[sdiy] Contemplating DIP microcontrollers

[Julien Delgoulet]

I agree, arduino is a great platform for prototyping and learning microcontrollers.
As for DAC, MCP4822 are $3 directly from microchip and it is a dual spi 12bits dac. I don't think it is that expensive regarding what you can do with it.
I'm prototyping an LFO and it seems that I can get 4 of them (LFOs) running at the same time with only one ATMEGA 168 + 2*MCP4822. (Using 10 bits wavetables).
That quite cheap for 4 LFOs that do square/triangle/ramp up/ramp down/Sine ... (I'm also trying to also feet some ADSR in that .... we'll see)

What could be great (may be I'm not aware of) is a dsp platform that has the easy learning curse as the arduino and that work seemlessly on OSX ...




Le 21 déc. 2010 à 12:43, John Luciani a écrit :

> 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
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