starting up

hey there, i never worked w/ microcontrollors b4, just mpus.
i just want to know if the difference is that the mc has a built in memory to where the program is stored? ow, and how is it programmed? i mean is there something like an eeprom programmer?? :?

The main diffirence between a µC and a CPU is that a cpu only has busses (address, data,...) to the outside world, the actual IO devices and the memory are connected outside the CPU. A microcontroller has all these things onboard. program ROM (or EEPROM), RAM, inputs and outputs (digital and optionally analog) are all integrated into the chip, so it can function standalone.
Also, microcontrollers are meant to control things (hence the name), wich in most cases doesn't require serious number crunshing, therefore most µC are not very good at mathematics while most CPU's are.

Programming is indeed similar to (eep)rom programming.

ok, thanx, one more question.. um, whats a good uc to start with.. :shock:

Well, most ppl on this forum (including me) seem to like pic's
The Pic16F628 is a nice one to start with and there are tutorials for it , and a programmer with programmer software on www.winpicprog.co.uk

www.microchip.com is the makers of these pic's

Then there are also AVR's from atmel, On the outside quite similar to pic's but programming them is a diffirence, they've got a bigger instruction set
www.atmel.com
www.avrfreaks.com

There are many others, but i don't know about them. Like i said, i use pic's and once you use a certain type of micro one tends to stick with it.

ok, thanx alot

My university teaches microcontrollers on 8051 chips. There's a full Free C compiler and stuff for them available (http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/). They're pretty easy to use.