On Mon, 2 Mar 2009 09:44:05 -0500 David VanHorn <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Actually the program so far is only 10KB. But it takes like 2 seconds > > to write, another 2 seconds to read back/verify, so that's 4/5 > > seconds ! ;- > > OMG! :) Remember the days of Eproms? 15 minutes to erase, 5-10 to > program... Yes, I am only 31 year old but I vividly remember that... and I am NOT regretting them ! ;-) When I did my industrial placement in 1999/2000, I spent the first few months developping on a PIC 17C something, which stored its program in EPROM ! So for every 10 seconds I spent doing a quick modification to the program, I had to spend 10 minutes to erase the PIC ! And go figure, every time it seemed it needed longer to be erased properly ! At firt 5 minutes seemed enough, then after some erase cycles, some areas of the memory didn't read FF's, so I had to put it again for a few minutes. I think after a few months (and countless erase cycles), the bloody things needed 20 minutes to be reliably cleared ! :-/ Thank God, after that, my boss moved to a 16Fxxx chip which had Flash, PHEW !!! :-) Needless to say I was rather happy... At school in 1997 I learned MCU on an 8051 (well, a 80C552), so the program was n external memory, EPROM again then. Luckily, we had a development board to learn so the EPROM only stored the monitor... the user program was downloaded to the external RAM, phew. So when I discovered these AVR chips a few years back, I couldn't believe how much features and convenience it packed for such a low price ! It was like heaven.. seemd it had nothing but goodness to offer ! :-) The on-board JTAG debugging simply blew me away... I just couldn't believe a cheap 8 bit chip could have that buit-in ! I am not looking back... long live AVR's and modern 8 bit MCU's in general ! :-) -- Vince _______________________________________________ AVR-chat mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-chat
