[sdiy] Contemplating DIP microcontrollers

[John Luciani]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 5:01 AM,  <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu> wrote:

> If you add up the cost of, say, an ATMega328P and a MCP4922, you quickly exceed the cost of a dsPIC.
> So the question is would there be any reason not to jump straight to using a dsPIC?

One of the benefits of the ATmega ICs is the Arduino tools and the
large community of
developers. The tools are free and work on Linux, MAC, PC.

Unfortunately a lot of uC's (especially the ones made by Atmel) do not
include a DAC.
Adding a DAC above 8 or 10 bits gets expensive in a DIP package. Using SMD will
save quite a bit for higher resolution devices.

At my wiblocks site I have an Arduino compatible TH kit that integrates a quad
8-bit DAC (http://wiblocks.luciani.org/NB1/NB1A-index.html) and another
that integrates a dual 12-bit DAC + uSD card
(http://wiblocks.luciani.org/NB2/NB2AS-index.html).
The dual 12bit DAC in a DIP8 is expensive. A MIDI board and a
backplane are almost complete.

There is a numerically-controlled oscillator example at
http://wiblocks.luciani.org/docs/app-notes/nb1a-nco.html

(* jcl *)

http://www.wiblocks.com