22 Nov
2007
22 Nov
'07
9:38 a.m.
On 22 Nov 2007 at 11:01, Gordon JC Pearce 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.
I suggested the 8-pin model as a starting place. Fewer I/Os and
features to confuse. Blink some LEDs, spin a motor. Add more pins
as the complexity increases.
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...)
Shrug--it's a wash. The JDM programmers running off of a serial port
are scarcely more than that. And the evaluation kits for both AVR
and PIC are cheap enough and include their own USB programmers.
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?
Nope. I was looking at a "drive ready" circuit for floppy using some
one-shots and a couple of gates when I came to the conclusion that a
PIC was cheaper, smaller, required less adjustment and could even
keep a history of drive performance in EEPROM if I so desired.
It's a strange new world where code is more important than solder, it
seems. But then, anyone who's programmed an FPGA already knew
that...
Cheers,
Chuck