uP developers kit

[Byron G. Jacquot]

>Hi Philip. The HC11 seems like a good uP for building a midi knob box.
>It has 8 adc's, onchip eprom, several serial interfaces and a
>development environment as you described.  The best development kit I
>have found is Zorin's ModCon, www.zorinco.com. They also sell a midi
>gizmo that comes with midi line drivers and female panel mount midi
>jacks. I've had good luck with this company. Regards,

I can second that the HC11 family are easy to use, with the right debugging
tools.  But (a couple years ago, at least) it seemed like they didn't scale
from InCircuitEmulator to actual burned EPROM.  You needed the ICE for
development (which overlaid the end-poduct ROM with RAM), then an EPROM
programmer after that to make a standalone unit.

The low cost ICE (the EVBU2, as I recall) is no longer made and rather hard
to find anymore.  There are a couple of smallish eval kits, but they're only
affordable for students.

If they've added in-system flash versions recently, forgive me, as I've
switched to a different family recently.

And if an HC11 is too much horsepower, you can look into the HC05 and HC08.

>> I hope to build a midi knob box. I found a local fellow who is well
versed in >>machine coding for the 6500 series of uPs.  (he used Commodore
Platform). Can >>anyone recommend a good system for development that would
be a smooth >>transition? I think newer systems have serial lines and
software for coding on >>the PC and uploading to the uP kit...this will be
completely new to him. If I >>can find an econo CPU that uses similar
programming mnemonics it would be >>appreciated.

Actually, intimate knowlege of all of the 6502's addressing modes is a
pretty good thing, but few modern machines have that many...makes for some
solid background, though.  He'll probably be fairly comfortable on most
8-bit architectures, given a databook to help through the tight spots.
Candidates might be the HCxx families, the 8031/51 families, the Microchip
PIC, and the Atmel AVR lines (among others).

Depending on what you want in the product (do you want a little board with
the micro and some prototyping area?  A system that drops in your own end
board and acts like the final micro (ICE)?), you may be a bit limited by
whats out there at what price.  The PICs are fairly cheap, with free
software and low-parts-count programming.  But they're mostly EEPROM, so you
write, hit a bug, and then erase and start over.

A buncha folks on this group (myself included) are using the Atmel AVR
processors.  They come in a wide array of packages/features with just about
all the onboard recources you need for what you're suggesting.  They're a
Harvard RISC architecture, so they don't look much like a 6502 at times, but
I've found that they're much more convenient, and I can write much tighter
code for them.

You can start with the STK200 or STK300 boards (check
http://www.atmel.com/ad/mcu_order.html).  They start at $50 for an eval
board, and when it comes time to move to your own board, just add a small
header, and the programmer unit will interface with the final hardware for
programming.  There's also a $200 ICE if you need more debugging power.

Best of all, the AVR use FLASH instead of (EP)ROM.  You can reprogram and
erase them with very little hassle, certainly not pulling them up from the
board.

I hope this lends some insight!

Byron Jacquot