On Wednesday, 27 November 2013 00:14:58 UTC, NeonJohn wrote: > > > > On 11/26/2013 06:06 PM, Matt Wetherill wrote: > > > I thought I might try something driven by an Arduino - it'll be quite > > a learning curve but should keep me busy ;) > > Hi Matt, > > Welcome back. Mine may not be a real popular opinion but I do NOT like > the Arduino. It's mangled sorta-C++ is a pain, though you can program > in C except for some libraries. It's expensive for what you get and > quite short on I/O pins. Incidentally, if you just want to play with > the Arduino style of doing things, Digikey sells the programmed chip for > $5. Just add 5 volts, a TTL serial interface and a clock and there you > go. > > I suggest looking at one of the several chips that have battery-backed > RTCs built-in. Get one in DIP format and assemble something on a proto > board. > > BTW, in the next week or two I'm going to be open sourcing (hardware and > software) a nifty little count-down counter that I designed for one of > our products. It uses the ATmega8515 which isn't a very interesting > chip but it has lots of I/O pins which is what I needed. I heavily > document my code, especially that which gets released so it would be a > good starting point. I'll announce here when I get it finished (boards > to be here on Black Friday :-) > > John > > Hi John, Thanks for the reply - good to have your advice on this. I'm very new to electronic / microprocessor design - not so bad with coding (I come from an IT background) but I've got a lot of learning to do with regards to hardware :) I guess I'll look out some reference designs and try to build enough understanding to start hacking some stuff together on proto boards.
The countdown counter you mention above sounds very interesting - I look forward to reading more about it. cheers Matt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/ae7f89c9-691f-4ce0-a23e-9e9e25db682b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
