Has anyone seen this?
http://mp3elf.net/index.phpIt looks kind of neat. Lately I've had the desire to play with PICs. This can program them, from what I understand. That's just a bonus, though.
Posted by: n2toh
Re: MP3elf - 20/03/2006 17:17
The St chip used by that thing is cooler than the one from ATMEL.
Posted by: wfaulk
Re: MP3elf - 21/03/2006 13:47
My understanding is that PICs are cheap, at least compared to virtually everything else. No?
Posted by: sn00p
Re: MP3elf - 21/03/2006 14:13
For a hobbyist, no. For a product that ships thousands of units per month then maybe.
You can pick up a AT91SAM7S32 chip for about £3 in one off pricing. The AT91SAM7S256 can be had for about £8. They're significantly cheaper in even low volume multiples of 100.
Dev boards are cheap too, maybe ranging between $30 and $100 depending on what goodies the chip has on-board.
Given that your development tools are free (and the C compiler actually works - gcc) and that the jtag interface consists of a 30p buffer, the cost in terms of hardware & hair loss is significantly lower than using a PIC or AVR.
I have on my desk here at work a £12,000 emulator for a siemens processor, an AVR jtag-ice and a usb jtag interface for ARM and I can safely say that any project we do here from now either uses ARM7 or xscale. It's just not worth the time/effort/money trying to coax a 8 bit c-compiler to generate code that works, even for trivial applications.
Posted by: tman
Re: MP3elf - 21/03/2006 14:42
Forgot to say that you need the TINI eval module which is about $70 and Maxim for obvious reasons don't offer this part as a sample.
Posted by: andym
Re: MP3elf - 21/03/2006 18:36
Long time no hear Adrian! I thought a discussion about microcontrollers might bring you back from the wilderness. I'm playing with a PICAXE at the moment which has it's good and bad points. But once I've got some spare time I'm going to give ARM7 a proper go.