Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Newbie questions about microcontrollers.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Lac

New Member
Hello there!

I'm very new to this, but I've decided that i want to make my own project with blinking leds, beeping speakers etc. etc. But before i can do this I need to gather parts, so now I need to select a microcontroller and a device programmer. I have, as allready said, very little knowledge about this, so explain things easy for me :wink: .

So I would generaly like to know wich microcontroller is the best for such basic tasks, knowing about the most popular and the pros and cons about each of them wouldn't hurt either :D And along with a microcontroller i think i will need a programmer. Cheaper the better, but I think it would be nice if it was compatible with at least more chips than just one.

So thanks in advance! Hope i get to decide!
Lac
 
Hi,
Good places to start is at and also http://www.Talkingelectronics.com
Both these sites have excellent tutorials on PIC micros. I am a newbie myself and have found these sites of great value.
Also good idea to read through the posts in this very forum. All the categories are VERY informative and there is a wealth of information on PIC programming and other PIC related subjects, especially under micro controllers.
Enjoy your quest! It is great fun.
Barry.
PS I am obviously biased towards PIC :lol:
 
I'm obviously biased towards PIC's as well :lol:

But a poll carried out here a little while ago found they were by far the most popular among members. Barry kindly suggested my tutorials, these are designed to be cheap and easy - no PCB's required, all the tutorials are built on veroboard. The PIC's used are all EEPROM versions, so are easily reprogrammable.

Don't dismiss other micro-controllers without considering them, the AVR series are probably the next most popular - but the PIC's RISC technology (only 35 instructions) make them fairly easy to learn, and the chips are pretty cheap.
 
As far as i have understood PIC and AVR are two types of architechture for MCs?
As I stand now, I'm more into the AVR chips (whatever that means :? ), reason for this is that after reading some tutorials over at Iguana Labs, I stubled upon a VERY nice programmer (in my eyes), the "PG302 Device Programmer It is cheap and it support some AVR chips from Atmel without buying any extra adapters. Pluss if you invest in some cheap adapters you get to choose from a much wider selections of MCs.

But whats really the difference between AVR and PIC MCs?

Thanks in advance!
Lac[/url]
 
"This enables AVR RISC MCUs to provide true single-clock-per-instruction execution in part by prefetching an instruction during the previous instruction execution. In other architectures, the external oscillator clock is divided down to the traditional internal execution cycle. In the AVR architecture, by comparison, a cycle is equivalent to exactly one oscillator cycle which increases speed. "
[https://www.marubunarrow.com/news/dd_09_98/atmel_avr.htm]
 
Nigel Goodwin said:
I'm obviously biased towards PIC's as well :lol:
Barry said:
PS I am obviously biased towards PIC

join the club :lol:

As far as i know, AVR runs at the crystals speed. This gives headroom for higher speeds. One other thing is that PIC's have an 8 level stack, where as the stack in an AVR is base in the RAM. This means that the stack level is only limited to how much ram is available for use.

But seriously, i don't think anyone here would use AVR for that 'nested loop' memory extension.

I chose PIC because it was the most documented, and the cheapest. If i chose AVR i would have to learn "in the dark" because it isn't that well documented.

Other than that, i think i'll stick to PIC for a little while longer.
 
Go ahead and use the AVR because of the neat programmer you found. However, us PICheads here might not be able to help you in case you run into problems.
 
Hmm.. But whats's the difference between "Normal" Programmers and "In-Circuit" Programmers? How does "In-Curcuit" worsk? Do you just connect a wire from the programmer to a home made conenctor at the finished PCB?

Thanks!
Lac.
 
Lac said:
Hmm.. But whats's the difference between "Normal" Programmers and "In-Circuit" Programmers? How does "In-Curcuit" worsk? Do you just connect a wire from the programmer to a home made conenctor at the finished PCB?

The target circuit has to be designed with this in mind, you may have to lose two I/O pins, or add extra circuitry to switch them to the programmer.

MicroChip have application notes on how to do it, personally I find it's easier to just socket the chip - obviously if you were using SM versions, it's a different matter.
 
Bah! You are explaining things so difficult to me :( . **broken link removed** have a power connector for power (of course!) A serial port for connection to PC a RJ11 Jack for ??? and a 10-pin connector for ??? Any one know what these two connectors are used for?

Thanks!
Lac.
 
Lac said:
Bah! You are explaining things so difficult to me :( . **broken link removed** have a power connector for power (of course!) A serial port for connection to PC a RJ11 Jack for ??? and a 10-pin connector for ??? Any one know what these two connectors are used for?

It doesn't really tell you much, but I would suspect the 10 pin header is for connecting to the optional ZIF socket. The RJ11 is for connecting to a suitable in-circuit programmable board design - using the standard MicroChip connections.
 
Lots of questions here. But wouldn't it be cheaper to build my own Programmer? And if, where can I get the scematics? The drawings for the P16PRO40 at looks to be offline. Anywhere else I can get them?

Thanks in advance.
Lac.
 
Lac said:
Lots of questions here. But wouldn't it be cheaper to build my own Programmer? And if, where can I get the scematics? The drawings for the P16PRO40 at looks to be offline. Anywhere else I can get them?

You can find the P16PRO40 all over the place, it's not my original design, and in fact it's based very closely on the original David Tait design.

The P16PRO40 is the programmer I recommend, it's cheap and does pretty well everything you need - the particular one I use even has an in-circuit programming header added (it was kindly sent to me by a WinPicProg user, I did ask him if he could make more boards available, but unfortunately he couldn't).

You can access my site at **broken link removed**, my web forwarding service seems to be having problems at the moment :cry:
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top