Steve Moskovchenko wrote:
PICs are generally nice.. a good place to get started, and there are
linux tools available. You can get free samples of the chips on the
internet, but you still need a programmer. Some work better than others,
especially under linux. But there are ones that will work. A compiler
would also be useful- the upper level PICs have a patched gcc available
(which unfortunately isn't very bug free). There are other tools people
have made as well, like I think something sdcc related.
Yeah, sdcc was working on a PIC port last time I checked. The various
PIC uCs have nightmarishly bizarre and non-orthogonal instruction sets,
which makes writing a C compiler a real pain. That's part of the reason
I would recommend the Atmel AVRs... which have a RISC-ish instruction
set and a completely functional GCC port. Check out this example of
what you can do with an AVR:
http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/November2002/article251.shtml , it's a
complete current-limited benchtop power supply with RS-232 interface .
There are loads and loads of different PIC programmer software and
hardware for Linux. I took one called picprog and modified (I would say
improved :-) it to work with the 18F* series, using the data sheets
provided by Microchip. The AVR is very easy to program, there is a
truly trivial parallel port cable you can build and a program called
uisp that works with all the AVR models.
Dan
