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

good book for pics

[brandond1976]

Programming and Customizing PICmicro Microcontrollers by Myke Predko

Available on Amazon. The book icludes a PCB and parts list for building a PIC programmer. It includes a dos program (runs fine in wine) for transfering your programs to your pics.

This book is a lot of fun if your into this type of thing. I highly recommend it.

Re:Consider the AVR

[slacy]

Wow. I'm famous!

You should really be going here: slacy's page about building avr-gcc and avr toolchains for Linux

Thanks!

handyboard

[blackcoot]

it may be overkill for you, but i've used the handyboard (www.handyboard.com) for robotics stuff. it uses a c-esque language called interactive c, which is available gratis for linux, windows, and os x. it's a pretty decent (not great) environment. and if that fails, you can just program it in assembly (motorolla).

Re:Consider the AVR

[cnvogel]

If you consider doing more complex stuff with AVR microcontrollers, the "Ethernut 2" functions as a very interesting development environment (or even as a complete building block for products/projects). For about EUR 150 you get:

ATMega128 Microcontroller + 512 kByte RAM
Serial ports: RS232 + RS485
100 MBit Ethernet
most digital I/O and analog inputs of the Mega128 accessible on a row of jumpers.

The complete operating system (providing TCP/IP networking for example) that's running on that board is availably as sourcecode, you use your trusted gcc/binutils toolchain.

Programming is done via straight cables from your parallel port to the ethernut (or you can buy ready built programmers very cheap).

what I use

[fliptout]

I do some consulting using the Microchip Pics (pic16f870 mostly for the moment). In school we used the motorola 68hc12.

Since you are an EE student, you might look into checking out a development board from your department. That should give you something to play with for free.

Failing that, I'd recomment getting a breadboard, a few sample Pics (free samples, w00t) or whatever microcontroller you want, instead of a development board. Depending on what kind of controller, you may need an external oscilator or that sort of thing, but overall the setup should be pretty cheap.

I cannot attest to the quality of open software tools, but for my consulting, i use a combination of Sourceboost and MPLAB to program pics. There is a linux version of the Sourceboost IDE for around $70.