So I have decided to write a blog about microcontroller development for hobbyists. Along the way I will be developing many projects that you can follow along with. Since my biggest hobby is building robots, several projects will involve something robotic . That does not mean I will not have other projects and it does not mean that the robotic projects will not have other uses. I will try to tell you of other possible uses of my projects as many will detail interfacing to and using the peripheral features of the microcontrollers.
Since this is my first post I figure I should give you an idea of the types of things I am going to cover. Let’s start with what microcontrollers I will be working with. I will be posting on the PIC series from Microchip, the 8 bit AVR series from Atmel, and ARM7TDMI/Cortex-M3 devices mostly from NXP because that is who I bought my chips from.
Some of the Microchip devices I will be using are the 12F675, 16F684, 16F690, and maybe an 18F or 24F series chip. As for Atmel I use the mega48/88/168/328 series the most, but I also like the tiny24, tiny25, and tiny261 series chips. Moving up to 32 bit micros I like the ARM series of controllers. I have many of the NXP LPC2138 chips, and plan to buy some of their newer Cortex-M3 parts.
Being this is a site for hobbyists, I am going to rely on as much low-cost, freeware, and open source tools as I can. In fact I am going to show you how to set up the development environments so you can make your own creations. The PIC chips are going to use MPLAB from Microchip. For the low-end parts I normally stick with assembly, but MPLAB now has a code size limited C compiler, so I am going to have to try it out. The Atmel chips have several choices, especially with open source tools. WinAVR was the main open source C compiler for AVRs for the longest. Then Atmel took it over and moved WinAVR into their code base. You can still get the last release of WinAVR from sourceforge.net. People who like open source did not like this much, so a person from Make Hack Void decided to make an updated version he called MHV AVR tools. The tool uses a newer version of the underlying C compiler and support tools. The third option for AVRs is Atmels own toolchain AVR Studio, which is now on version 5. With version 5, Atmel added in the code for WinAVR rather than it being a plug-in. Finally for the ARM processors, again I will be using open source tools like YAGARTO. A single IDE (integrated development environment) would be great and limit our need to learn different software tools. Reality then sets in and you find there are many choices. I am going to stick with the Eclipse IDE for ARM and AVR. As for PIC chips, I have seen some info on trying to develop in Eclipse so I may give it a try. This should give you an idea of what tools we will be using for developing the code.
I know I did not make every keyword a link, but do not worry as we will get there. I did not want to overload you with links. As we progress, I will make sure to include links for the major keywords used.
Stay tuned for the next post as I go over some of the initial projects I will be working on. I will also throw in a few links of suppliers I use. Until then – see you.
Tony's Robotics Place 