[sdiy] how you got started with your current µC? (was: Re: Most common ICs)

[rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk]

I started using dev boards for PICs about 20 years ago for industrial 
projects, but these days I usually just go straight to a first hash of 
the intended hardware...

When you're just starting out it's nice to have a development board that 
guarantees the correct power supply, clock and reset signals are 
presented to the processor and a convenient method of programming, so 
you don't have to worry about these things.  It also often provides a 
few other built-in features too like some switches, some LEDs, pots, an 
LCD, RS-232 serial port, CAN port, USB etc.  However, I quickly realised 
that for most of the things I was developing I didn't use half of the 
things on the dev boards, and/or the quality of the Microchip dev boards 
was actually quite poor.

For instance Microchip's dsPICDem Dev Board only has a crappy 8-bit 8kHz 
CODEC on board which is fine for telecoms quality speech but completely 
useless for pro-audio applications, and doesn't have proper analogue and 
digital ground-planes either.  It also doesn't have MIDI in/out, uses a 
different LCD to the industry standard Hitachi alphanumeric standard, 
etc, and has really crappy thumbwheel "preset" pots for the analogue 
inputs that only last for about 10 turns before wearing out!  For these 
reason I usually make my own "dev Board" with just the features I want 
on it to help me develop whatever I'm working on at the time.

There's a lot to be said for knocking out the first version of hardware 
as early as you can, then you find out about potential hardware problems 
and deficiencies as early as possible.  Ground loops, unwanted noises, 
LCD glitches, switch bounces, etc...  Leaving more time to thing about 
and implement solutions.

-Richie,

On 2015-09-19 22:46, Michael Zacherl wrote:
> I got curious:
> did you people start with a typical dev-board of PIC/AVR/STM32/... ?
> m.
> 
> On 19.Sep 2015, at 21:28 , Richie Burnett 
> <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> No probs here either.
>> 
>> -Richie,
>> 
>> ---- Pete Hartman wrote ----
>> 
>>> On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 4:43 AM, Gordonjcp <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 10:40:37PM +0100, Tom Wiltshire wrote:
>>>> I'd probably have to agree. TL07x op-amps would be my most used IC. 
>>>> Not very glamorous, but they're the glue that holds a million audio 
>>>> circuits together.
>>>> 
>>>> Aside from that, PIC uPs for digital, and SSM2164/V2164 for analog.
>>> 
>>> I've never liked PICs.  They're slow, expensive and very hard to 
>>> develop for, thanks to the sheer lack of support - and last time I 
>>> looked you had to pay extra for surface-mount!
>>> 
>>> I used AVR for a bit but I'm moving over to STM32 - ridiculously 
>>> cheap and ridiculously fast.
>>> 
>>> This must be a personal taste thing, as I have no problems at all 
>>> programming with PICs.  The documentation is very good, and there are 
>>> lots of examples to get over the most difficult part which is how to 
>>> set the various switches (in AVR world the equivalent is the 
>>> "fuses").  I've actually had more frustration figuring out how to set 
>>> fuses, to be honest.  I haven't played with the STM32s, I'll 
>>> certainly have to give that a try.
> 
> --
> http://mz.klingt.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Synth-diy mailing list
> Synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/mailman/listinfo/synth-diy