Want to learn about microcontrollers, what do I need to buy?

httpete

I know a fair bit of assembly on the pc and I want to learn how to program microcontrollers. I dont really have any clue about this area though. From I gather, I need more than just a microcontroller, I need a circuit board to run it on...is this correct? And then I would need some LEDs and other peripherals to mess about with, yes?

So can someone fill me in on what components I need to get up and running with microcontrollers? I would also appreciate any advice on the best place to buy this stuff.

323

May not be the best person to advise you as only got back to playing with micro-controllers recently for a little pet project that has been on the back burner for a few years.

When undecided which micro-controller to use, downloaded a number of Simulator IDE's. Allow you to play around and try your program's with various peripheral devices, LED's, keypad, LCD matrix, Stepper Motor, signal generator and scope etc. before you have commit to hardware.

httpete

323 wrote: »

May not be the best person to advise you as only got back to playing with micro-controllers recently for a little pet project that has been on the back burner for a few years.

When undecided which micro-controller to use, downloaded a number of Simulator IDE's. Allow you to play around and try your program's with various peripheral devices, LED's, keypad, LCD matrix, Stepper Motor, signal generator and scope etc. before you have commit to hardware.

Cheers mate but I am definietly looking to buy some physical hardware, I think I will have more motivation to learn it if I have the hardware sitting on my desk.

I read the following on Wikipedia -

As of 2008 there are several dozen microcontroller architectures and vendors including:

• ARM core processors (from many vendors)
• Atmel AVR (8-bit), AVR32 (32-bit), and AT91SAM (32-bit)
• Cypress Semiconductor PSoC (Programmable System-on-Chip)
• Freescale ColdFire (32-bit) and S08 (8-bit)
• Freescale 68HC11 (8-bit)
• Intel 8051
• Infineon: 8, 16, 32 Bit microcontrollers[6]
• MIPS
• Microchip PIC, (8-bit PIC16, PIC18, 16-bit dsPIC33 / PIC24), (32-bit PIC32)
• NXP Semiconductors LPC1000, LPC2000, LPC3000, LPC4000 (32-bit), LPC900, LPC700 (8-bit)
• Parallax Propeller
• PowerPC ISE
• Rabbit 2000 (8-bit)
• Renesas RX, V850, Hitachi H8, Hitachi SuperH (32-bit), M16C (16-bit), RL78, R8C, 78K0/78K0R (8-bit)
• Silicon Laboratories Pipelined 8051 Microcontrollers
• STMicroelectronics ST8 (8-bit), ST10 (16-bit) and STM32 (32-bit)
• Texas Instruments TI MSP430 (16-bit)
• Toshiba TLCS-870 (8-bit/16-bit)

As a newcomer to this area I haven't a clue what I should be looking for. Any recommendations on which microcontroller I should buy? And what other components do I need to get?

Sputnik

Microchip with the PIC series and Atmel with AVR's would be some of the more popular. If you're starting off picking one of those would would give you the biggest communities to get info from.

fenris

check out some of the Arduino tutorials

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
http://www.arduinotutorials.com/

A good starter kit with enough bits to get going is:
http://www.oomlout.co.uk/starter-kit-for-arduino-ardx-p-183.html
There are lots of others to be found on ebay - Arduino clones are okay too. Just get a basic kit like that and add whatever else you need later, I think that Farnell or Radionics do a kit also.


Some inspiration for when you have the bits and are not sure what to do with them!

http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-40-arduino-projects-of-the-web/
http://www.instructables.com/technology/arduino/
https://sites.google.com/site/projectsentrygun/
http://diydrones.com/

httpete

fenris wrote: »

check out some of the Arduino tutorials

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
http://www.arduinotutorials.com/

A good starter kit with enough bits to get going is:
http://www.oomlout.co.uk/starter-kit-for-arduino-ardx-p-183.html
There are lots of others to be found on ebay - Arduino clones are okay too. Just get a basic kit like that and add whatever else you need later, I think that Farnell or Radionics do a kit also.


Some inspiration for when you have the bits and are not sure what to do with them!

http://hacknmod.com/hack/top-40-arduino-projects-of-the-web/
http://www.instructables.com/technology/arduino/
https://sites.google.com/site/projectsentrygun/
http://diydrones.com/

Im after doing some more reading up on microcontrollers and it seems it's a choice between Microchip PIC controllers or Arduino...

Whats the story with Arduino, is it any good for learning about electronics or does it abstract away all the low level stuff? Is it possible to use assembly if I get an Arduino microcontroller?

I also read that Arduino has a better community so thats a definite advantage.

Another thing I am wondering about it is if it possible to debug the code that you program microcontrollers with...I want to be able to step through assembly so I can see exactly whats going on.

ressem

If you are looking to debug code, especially assembly, you probably don't want to pay for a hardware debugger, so you'd probably debug in an emulator, like http://www.atmel.com/microsite/avr_studio_5/default.asp AVR studio or simavr.

If you want to do debugging the awkward way on the hardware, you could just start with writing your program using C, and gradually replace the c statements with asm blocks.

Learning the electronics side, as in resistors, capacitors, your volts, ohms and amps is separate. Learning this is done easily using experimentation in the default simple arduino application and a book. Nothing gained by doing this in assembler.

Redisle

httpete wrote: »

Im after doing some more reading up on microcontrollers and it seems it's a choice between Microchip PIC controllers or Arduino...

Whats the story with Arduino, is it any good for learning about electronics or does it abstract away all the low level stuff? Is it possible to use assembly if I get an Arduino microcontroller?

I also read that Arduino has a better community so thats a definite advantage.

Another thing I am wondering about it is if it possible to debug the code that you program microcontrollers with...I want to be able to step through assembly so I can see exactly whats going on.

Arduino uses a bootloader on top of standard AVR chips and comes with a really simple IDE. I wouldn't recommend it if you want to work with low level stuff as it is basically an abstraction layet above that.

For example standard micro controller programming would involve using actual device registers to set states of pins using XOR's etc where arduino would just be something like (pinmode,output). That said there is a massive community and tons of existing libraries and it is a great path to fast prototyping.

The cheapest possible dev board kit would probably be the TI MSP430 Launchpad
at less than 4 euro. There are a bunch of tutorials on this scattered about the place too.

Other than that there is some nice AVR based tutorials here:
http://hackaday.com/2011/03/14/guide-for-working-with-avr-microcontrollers/

Man of Aran

Guys sorry for cutting into the current chat and slightly off topic, not sure how to start off new thread yet but the right people will be reading this section anyhow.
Trying to locate operation manual for above item. Tried Google search already, only specs sheet could be found.
Bought one 2nd hand, legitimate but no manual. It's a discontinued model.

thanx in advance for any pointers.

badgerbaiter

Try PICAXE.. Its a great and easy place to start with plenty of free resources and do good cheap project boards. Its easy to figure out. I do quite a bit myself so feel free to ask me anything

ozmo

Redisle wrote: »

The cheapest possible dev board kit would probably be the TI MSP430 Launchpad
at less than 4 euro. There are a bunch of tutorials on this scattered about the place too.

Would you know any other suppliers of that board at that price? - that site wont take orders less than 20 euros .. ta.

gooch2k9

ozmo wrote: »

Would you know any other suppliers of that board at that price? - that site wont take orders less than 20 euros .. ta.

Order direct from the TI estore. Comes in about €3.50 and order a few samples MSP430s, these can be got free(separate order, not estore), something like the G2452, that has most features.

Launchpad Link:
https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx

Out of stock at the minute...

Sparks

And you might note that if you're just coming into the area for the first time, ignore the urge to get down to bit-twiddling and assembly on the first day. You *will* need to debug stuff and debugging hardware without five to six figure's worth of diagnostic tools can tend to be a steep learning curve. Well, more a steep learning wall, really.

Honestly, start with something like an Arduino or a BASIC stamp or one of the other chips that has high-level language support from the get-go. And spend money on things like demo boards and the like. Buying a bunch of chips and some wire is cheaper, and you *can* learn to make what you need that way, but it takes a year for most people in a full-time CS or CEng college course to do that, and they have large libraries, lectures, tutorials, labs with more kit and experts on-hand for that learning curve (and half of them never really "get it" even with all that).

Buy something that's almost childishly easy to play with. And then play with it. By the time you hit the limit of the demo board in trying to build your application, you may well have learnt all you need to know to go off and do your project from a blank canvas.

badgerbaiter

You could always make your own? Its not dificult and a lot more rewarding
what is it exactly you want to get from microcontrollers?

Sparks

badgerbaiter wrote: »

You could always make your own? Its not dificult and a lot more rewarding
what is it exactly you want to get from microcontrollers?

It's not difficult until something goes wrong. And things always go wrong, it's why we invented the word "debugging". And when they go wrong, you're left with virtually no debugging tools at all if you're a newbie doing this at home. If you've a hardware ICE or a JTAG interface to the chip or a DSO or a logic analyzer, and know how to use them, then yeah, it's easy (but then, you wouldn't be a newbie doing this at home, you'd be an experienced person doing this in a lab or God's Own Shed). Or if you have an unlimited amount of time and patience and access to all the tech specs (and happily that last one is now much easier to arrange), you could poke at it long enough that it eventually capitulates and works.

But someone who's just starting off won't have any of those things (except maybe the tech specs); and this is one of the few problems where throwing money (and not much money either - you could spend a hundred euro or so and get everything you need in a pre-assembled starters kit from most vendors) at the problem can fix it.

And by the way, every time you hear the word "rewarding" in relation to microelectronics of any kind, you should probably substitute something like the phrase "weeks of grinding finicky annoying labour that finally goes away when you realise that the wire you thought was connected was actually the victim of a dry solder joint".

The joy in these things is largely from what you get the overall system to do, rather than from getting components of the system to work...

tomtherobot

badgerbaiter wrote: »

Try PICAXE.. Its a great and easy place to start with plenty of free resources and do good cheap project boards. Its easy to figure out. I do quite a bit myself so feel free to ask me anything

I'd strongly recommend PICAXE aswell, just did my first project with it and was very pleased. Nice interface for programming, a lot of info available and their forum is very helpful.