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Microcontrollers!!!!

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Haidy

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Hello all
im a beginner in electrical engineering study
probably i'll b specialized in power & control engineering
im a member in ieee (by the way)
now im taking a course in atmel 8051
then im confused about studying AVR or PIC??
please tell me which is better
or at least which to start with
another request plz
which programming language to study with any of them??
for example,,, basic? assembly? C? or what???
im waiting for any replies from u
thank u all
bye
 
Neither would be better. Just pick the one you like the most. You can use any language with any MCU- it's the language of the compilers you have available to you that matters.

Don't study in Basic (I personally believe it's for young kids or people who don't ever plan to learn another language or study electronics in school). C is probably best. Use assembler only if you are really doing low level stuff with a specific processor (the language varies for chip to chip). Have you ever seen assembly? It's so low level (you have to explicity take care of EVERYTHING, all registers, transfers, EVERYTHING). It's hard to do anything high level with.
 
If you are studying to be an electrical engineer, you should most certainly learn how to develop and program with assembler including building higher level constructs from lower level routines. After that, most every microcontroller on the market has a C compiler for it. Knowing C will also help you with application development on PCs.

Personally I don't think they should have courses on any 1 particular form of controller. Assembler concepts can be learned without having specific target hardware as they all work in a very similar fashion. Once you have the basics down, it is just a matter of reading datasheets to find the architecture and instruction differences.
 
Both AVR or PIC are good. It seems PIC are more popular now and also cheaper than Atmel ones. It's a long battle wich on is the best. Personnally i use PICs (from the 10F to the DSPIC) all the time for all of my project... when i can fit one in ;) Those who use Atmel will say Atmel is best and you know ;)

Anyways, wich language to use? Learn assembler first then choose one between BASIC (even if some seems to have some problem with that) or C.

Basic is more simple to learn. Faster? More efficient? Well it depend how much of built-in function you'll use.. some are pleased to use some built-in function when few lines of codding are much code efficient... it's just experience i guess.

C is really good too, a bit harder to learn but, depending wich one, tend to compile tightest code than BASIC. BUT it's always depend wich built-in function you use.

Every compiler in the whole world have the same mission... make things simpler and reduce the time to market delay. Whatever you use, even if you use the C and your programming method is poor, results will be the same. Keep in mind that some are really new on the market and may contain some bugs. I know some that still have some problem with some 'basic' function like loop. anyways, not interesting at this moment.

There's no better language, what make it better is the guy behind the keyboard... sorry if this one start flames by some sensitive user. BTW i use both C and Basic. Basic is the main i use. In both i'll insert some assembler line when needed.

Ask yourself what you need to do, how much money you want to spend, how much time you want to spend on the learning process, then have a look to the compiler website, try their demo, have a look on their forum and have fun! That's it :)

Compiler i use and safely recommend Hi-Tech C, and Melabs PICBasic PRO.
 
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i have been using avr microcontrollers . i am quite comfortable with them. Its instruction set is quite similar to 8085 microprocessor's. And i would recommend you to learn assembly language first and then if you already know Clanguage start using AVR GCC compiler. Check it out yourself ..
www.avrbeginners.net this is the best place where you can get started.

ps:it would have been more appropriate if you had posted this message in micro controllers forum
 
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