For example, the ATMega8 user's manual runs to
over 300 pages (PDF
downloadable for free)
Sigh. You'd think if they actually wanted to make the documentation
_usable_, they'd make it plain text. Apparently glitz wins out over
usability once again.
and it doesn't even discuss the instruction
set--that's in the "AVR
family" manual.
Hm, I was recently looking for single-chip computers, and discarded the
atmega stuff because the documentation digikey pointed me at didn't
have an instruction-set section. (I ended up with Freescale's
MC68HC908QY4.) Perhaps I should revisit them - do you happen to have a
pointer to the instruction set documentation handy? (I perhaps could
find it, eventually, but the Web searches that appear to be everybody
else's - and in particular companies' - idea of easy-to-find
information are difficult and unpleasant, not to mention often
nonfunctional, for me. If you have it handy, that'd save me some
grubbing around.) I assume they're more of those damned PDFs, meaning
hours spent extracting the information from them into a form that's
actually usable, but that's an overhead cost I'm willing to invest for
a good microcontroller-style computer. (And more tree-killing, but
that's going to be true no matter what form the doc takes.)
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