22 Nov
2007
22 Nov
'07
3:01 a.m.
On Thursday 22 November 2007 00:00:45 Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 21 Nov 2007 at 15:37, Chris M wrote:
Meh. Get a big tube of the bigger ones. For what you pay in onesy-twosey
quantities in Maplin etc, you can get a big bag of them from eBay.
Phooee. PCs are arguably the best tools to learn
on.
It's such a vanilla architecture. Some earlier 8-bit
UK and Yank machines wouldn't be a bad 2nd choice, but
regarding media and such (he'll want to save programs
remember) it couldn't be easier. You can stick a 3.5"
HD drive in just about any peecee, even if it sees it
as a 720k.
I'd probably start a young 'un with a PIC. They're cheap, easy to
program and pretty much self-contained (no ROM, RAM or other chips to
worry about). You can start with a little 12F629 and blink lights and even run a little motor. Move up to some of the
PICs with more
I/O pins and build clocks, do basic communications, drive an LCD
display, run a robot, etc. Reprogrammable and rugged; can be
programmed in assembly or C or BASIC. If the kid makes magic smoke
with one or swallows one, no big deal. They'll run off of 3 or 4 AA
cells, so no worry about dangerous line voltages.
Programmers can be had for little more than the price of the ZIF
socket on one. Tools are free for the downloading.
I'm actually planning on moving my own projects from PIC to Atmel AVR, because
the Linux toolchain is better (and programmers are made of four resistors...)
ob. on-topic - one planned project is an IDE-to-parallel bridge so I can hang
some biggish drives off my PDP11. In theory I could just derive the control
signals from the parallel interface myself, but if I can offload some of the
command processing to an interface CPU then it might leave some cycles left
for RT-11 to run. Remember when we talked about intelligent peripherals?
Well, I make that a Z80 or similar in the drive (many modern IDE drives use a
Dragonball or similar) and an AVR in the interface.
Is it just me, or are things getting silly when it's cheaper and easier to
program a microcontroller to just be a bunch of decoder logic than getting
random logic to do it?
Gordon