Choosing a Microcontroller

What you need to know when choosing a microcontroller.

Gone are the days when there were less than a handful of micro-controller to choose. The fact is, the choice of a controller for a new product is an arduous task and is beyond the scope of this article, but will be discussed in more detail in a future article.

But the choice of a microcontroller to "play" for your first project is a little easier and the tools (hardware and software?) These days are very cheap if not free !....

In the past, emulators, programmers etc to use thousands of dollars (what are they thinking?). Now you can get a very low cost development tools.

10 years, I chose to go with Microchip. Why? And not only that a free development environment (MPLAB IDE), but also tons of support through forums and application notes on its website.

At that time, my project is essentially a simple electronic switch. So after withsuch easy, almost all the microorganisms that work.

Choose one of the lowest number of micro PIC12xxx. These little babies were around 512 bytes of OTP (One Time Programmable) ROM and approximately 25 bytes of RAM! (you can run Windows XP ... I think not !!!). Much he had in mind, however.

Today, there are many more vendors (TI, Atmel, etc.) that offer support and also excellent.

A relatively new "actors" who are out of the crowd is Cypress' PSOC mixed-signal set of micro-controllers. These devices are very flexible in terms of new equipment. The other big advantage of these devices is the ability, using their free tool (from now Diseñador PSOC PSOC Express) in its program of micro-controllers without writing a single piece of code! ... Learn more about these in another article.

So if you are starting in this fascinating field, keep it simple and start with a low micro. Most vendors provide free samples of their Web sites listed below.

* TI - Texas Instruments
* Microchip Inc.
Cypress *

There are many others, but they were the main actors, I am interested in