Companies Selling Microcontroller Kits?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm in college working on an electrical engineering degree, and I've had a few labs so far involving microcontroller setups. I'd now like to start doing some microcontroller projects of my own devising, so I'll need a programmer, the development software, and the MCUs themselves. The problem is that I don't have a wide experience with the different companies selling this sort of equipment. I know about the BASIC Stamps and the PIC offerings, but what other architectures are there? Both of the MCUs I've named have development tools, but they're for Windows. Are there any companies out there that supply their tools for BSD/Linux? What open source projects are there working on this (I've found gputiles). As always, free (as in beer) is good for us college students. :-)"

Comments

Linux friendly microcontrollers

[ActiveSX]

I've been using the BASIC Stamp Tools for Linux for a while now. It uses the (unfortunately) beerfree parallax pbasic tokenizer so. If you don't want to use the BS, the Atmel AVR series is well supported by open source software, and really fast as well (native code vs. interpreted).

Re:Linux friendly microcontrollers

[slacy]

I too would recommend the AVR series from Atmel. Their development boards (STK500 et. al.) are fairly inexpensive, and work with a variety of chips, including the cheap and versatile "2313" chip, my personal favorite.

If you're famaliar with C programming, then the AVRs are excellent, as gcc will cross-compile for these chips, and give excellent performance for the dollar, as most of the chips operate at 1 instruction per clock, speeds between 4 Mhz and 10Mhz. Getting a single-chip, 10 MIPS solution for $4 is pretty unbelivable.

As well, the chips are extremely cheap, (between $1.25 and $10) and easy to incorporate to whatever homebrew projects you can come up with, with minimal extra circuitry required, and extensive documentation in the spec sheets. Most of them are available in DIP form, so they're easy to prototype using a handy-dandy protoboard.

Just go to digi-key, and search for the parts I've mentioned above, and go from there.

Steve

Re:Consider the AVR

[mlyle]

The AVR is wonderful. Note you can get a complete development platform, the AVR Butterfly, for $20 and the price of soldering down a 3 pin serial header. Digikey has a bunch in stock.

The AVR is a really powerful architecture, and the GCC toolchain works pretty nicely, though there are some idiosyncracies (the main being that register naming is not consistent between all the parts, and occasionally flags are wrong.

PIC's

[Artega VH]

You've already found gputils its a great place to start...

For the pic16f and 18f series also check out the small device c compiler (works with other MCU's too).

There is a related GNU pic site at www.gnupic.org it lists pretty much everything you might need.

You asked about development tools for platforms other than windows - but in true /. style i'm going to ignore that: :p

winpicprog - i've found is quite good, i've yet to find anything in linux or bsd quite as complete...
-----------
As far as programming resources go since I'm actualy focusing on compiling c code for the pic using sdcc i've found that:
Nathan Hursts page on sdcc and the pic14 port (for pic 16 series)
and
Martin Dubuc's pic16 port
have been invaluable resources.

MSP430

[Jim Morash]

Check out the msp430 series from TI - fun to program, featureful, low power, and fully supported by free software in the form of 'MSPGCC'. Good stuff

Maxim-IC TINI board

[Miguel de Icaza]

These things are fairly robust for only having 20Mhz to work with allowing telnet access, FTP access, and even http access straight out of the box. This is one of the easiest microcontrollers I've seen to program do to the fact that you simply write Java code in your regular IDE (IDEA!!), rename the compiled .class file to a .tini file and FTP it over to the board. To start your program, you simply type 'java Test.tini &' and it loads into the background. These boards even have garbage collection (which makes things easier for you, but can slow things down). We were able to get the simple LED flashing demo up and running in about 10 minutes. I consider this a pretty big accomplishment since we have yet to get a serious demo running on the C-based microcontrollers from Atmel which continue to tell us we can't flash them due to some lock bits somewhere on the development kit. While some people have mentioned that the TINI board isn't really Java, I have to argue that the fact that I can write my code using my Java IDE and upload it nearly unchanged makes a pretty strong statement that this board is indeed running Java. At $100 for full Ethernet connectivity and a 20Mhz processor, I think it's a pretty good deal especially if you're a Java programmer looking to get into embedded systems. Now I just have to figure out how we tie it to our RF transmission system!