Author: Keith Evans
Date: 12:36:12 01/23/04
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On January 23, 2004 at 11:51:50, Dan Andersson wrote: > I'm looking for a hobby project. I have decided on a HW/SW one. And am thinking >on a Microcontroller kit. Any recommendations? PIC, MC, DSP or other neat gadget >links appreciated. Who knows? Maybe I'll compile a chess program on it. > >MvH Dan Andersson I recommend that you take a look at http://www.xess.com/ho03000.html#Examples and see the variety of projects that people have built using their boards. Xilinx has links to many board manufacturers on their site. (The basic stamp stuff may be too simple for you, but there are some possibilities to do interesting projects with it - http://www.parallax.com/. You might get some ideas from their site though.) Check out Circuit Cellar for ideas - http://www.circuitcellar.com/ (and periodically check on Midnight Engineering http://www.enteng.com/ just in case) If you're into implementing your own processor core, then you might also look at Xilinx's low-end picoblaze core which is targeted at CPLDs. The advantage of it over the higher end FPGA version is that the CPLD version has readable VHDL code available, whereas the high-end one has completely unintelligible VHDL code which is more like schematics. Since both are quite limited if you're into this sort of thing you can look at www.fpgacpu.org or www.opencores.org for more. Also take a look at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ee545/ and see what sorts of computer projects people have built for chess, go, and other things and see what ideas the students have come up with as far as hardware/software partitioning. I've seen some other good class websites, but can't remember them off the top of my head. As far as pure microcontrollers go I've had success with the low-end Atmel parts. They had on-board flash before PIC, but both have it now. Definitely order a catalog from www.digikey.com and have fun browsing that to see what sorts of cheap boards are available. Depending on what you want to do you might also consider just getting a Palm or a Gameboy+Flash cart. You could ever make your own custom cartridge for a Gameboy which could include custom hardware. You might be able to make hardware addons for Palm as well depending upon which model you buy. If you want to get more exotic could could get some info from the ARRL handbook or their magazine and consider getting into software radio. The knowledge that you gain could prove quite valuable in the future as it would have wide application. I'm working on GPS right now, and it would have been nice to have had some experience building radios. -Keith
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