Hi, On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 08:57 -0500, Eric Daine wrote: > Thanks all, Bob, Charles, and DJ, for the feedback on the Renesas chips, > > I am very glad to hear more about them. I was not aware that there was > another line > of microcontrollers that worked with GCC, so I'll spend some time > researching them, > your feedback will be very helpful. > <SNIP>
If you want another line of Micros that can use GCC, don't forget about the ARM cores. They have appeared in many places including the Gameboy Advance. For $80CDN you get a backlit LCD display, 256K of RAM, power supply with battery backup, and a 4Bit I/O port, or 8 bit UART with 3.3V TTL level outputs with several standard baud rates. To make the whole thing more useful, you can order a gizmo from Lik-Sang called `Gameboy Advance Movie Player' that houses a CF card slot that you can use to boot up homebrew programs into the RAM... I am using mine to control a lighting system I built. The source code and schematics can be made available, but are somehting of a hack. NOTE: I have not tried out the OKI chip below, the following comes from readind the datasheets I downloaded. Just the other day, I found that Oki semiconductor has released an ARM7 with peripherals, they call it `ML67Q4050' and `ML67Q4060'. They have from 64K to 128K of Flash rom on them, and it looks like you can program them via the onboard serial port, by using Intel Hex file. (E.g. from a terminal program.) They do have some internal SRAM, but it's a paltry 16K. Depending on the package they have up to 40 I/O pins to use. They also come in two flavours, one with an external bus, and one without. I would recommend the external bus version, it appears to have all the needed decoding logic built into the chip already, just hook up an SRAM and go. These chips run at 33MHz, so they have lots of power for most embedded hobby applications. The datasheet/manual appears complete, but lacks some polish. E.g. it gives information about what all the bits do in the registers, but does not give a lot of examples of how to use them. The UART in there has the layout of a 16550, so getting a console port working should not be too bad. These are available from Mouser Electronics for between $10 and $15USD. Have not checked availability. Not too bad for what you get. Mike
