On 23.02.17 17:51, Nicklas Karlsson wrote: > Atmel ICE and Atmel Studio is useful but a micro controller with a > Cortex-M*- CPU is probably a lot better choice.
Nicklas, we are all entitled to our personal preferences, but "Which is the god-ordained cpu to use" is in this case not the question asked. ;-) Before saying to a working developer busy debugging an existing software/hardware implementation, "Chuck out what you're using.", it just _might_ be worth taking a deep breath and considering that developer's war chest full of software libraries, reusable components of past projects, toolchain familiarity, and far from least, understanding of all the fiddly details of initialising and using the plethora of peripheral hardware on the chosen microcontroller. Secondly, "best for _which_ application? In between other stuff, I've just started on a day/night switch to turn off my brother's goat-paddock electric fence at night. Rather than lashing together comparator and timer chips, I can do it on one 8 pin ATtiny15, and add battery monitoring for free. Is it _really_ vital that we have quad-core 32 bit cpu power with MMUs for this task? Conversely, why is the ATtiny15 "best" for the job at hand? Answer: Because it has a few ADC channels, I have a few of them in my goodies box, AND I'm set up to develop with them. A good cook can make a hearty soup with whatever's in the larder, and is experienced with local ingredients. > They are very good, cheap, very common and used by many manufacturers. Nicklas, that is true for all the microcontrollers doing well on the market. They are also all fit for a broad variety of purposes, and it makes no difference on the outside of the box which microcontroller is inside. > Most of them if not all will be able to do PWM for DC or 3-phase > motors and probably the same with a quadrature encoder. Yes, that is true for so many microcontrollers, and the Atmel AT90PWM[123] are great little chips for implementing e.g. a 3-phase motor drive, as they have multiple PWM channels interlinked in hardware. BUT we don't know that the task at hand _is_ a 3-phase motor drive, do we? > Most of them if not all have UART and SPI for communication while the > more expensive also have Ethernet. If you can find a common and popular microcontroller range which does _not_ have as much of that as needed, then I'd like to take a look at them. (For 8 bit, USB can sometimes be more useful than Ethernet, though.) As the original question specifically referred to Arduino development, it may also be that being able to talk to the Arduino community is also a tangible benefit. It is doubtless more useful than mere CPU evangelism. All that said, I've long thought it would be fun to play with ARM, or the MSP30 (as it has a higher resolution ADC than AVR, IIRC.), but starting again at the bottom of the chip learning curve is definitely not the quickest or most efficient way to achieve a working application when microcontroller product ranges are mostly much of a muchness. Erik ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
