There are many microcontrollers of different manufacturers. Motorola produces the powerful 68332. There are the widespread PIC-microcontrollers, which are not as powerful. An old fashioned series are the successors of the Intel 8051.
Very interesting are the fairly fast microcontrollers of the Atmel AVR-line. They are RISC-processors (Reduced Insruction Set Computer) including 32 Registers with which most of the instructions are executed in just one clock cycle.
As first attempt I want to use the ATMega 161 as main controller. But because it had delivery problems I used the pin compatible AT90S8515, which contains only half as much flash memory for programs. The ATMega 128 will be of interesr for the upcoming more complex tasks, which got 128 KB of program flash memory. All of these processors have the ability to address fast SRAM over a parallel interface.
The AT90S2313 will be used for simple taks on external boards and the AT90S4433 is my choice if A/D conversion is necessary.
As development platform I use a STK500 Starterkit, which I bought from Reichelt for €128,-. With this board programs can be testet before they are copied to the target system. The AVR-Studio can be acquired from Atmel for no additional cost. It is an integrated development environment like the Microsoft Visual Studio. With this programming in assembler is possible.
The application notes from Atmel provides lots of helpful hints for many applications. AVR-Freaks have a web site which is specialized on collecting informations and tools for Atmel microcontrollers.
AVR-Freaks also provide the free GNU-C++-Compiler for AVR processors including a COFF-Converter enabling debugging using the AVR studio.
© Mario Boller-Olfert 2002 - E-Mail: Kontaktformular - 123-Byte - Marios Welt