Which Microcontroller you "Like the Most?" & Which Microcontroller you "Want to work on but don't have it right now?"

i love the TI MSP430G2553 also.

I am looking forward to working more with pic's and atmel.

But i think my next purchase will be some $4 PSoC 4 boards 

I never herd of them till a week or so ago, and so i want a few to try out.

I have several projects on the back burner that i think these will be good for.

Wow these are small and cheap. I will buy 1 or 2 of them soon but I am more into powerful Microcontrollers. I love to work on such powerful things to squeeze all the power out of them, to take them to extreme that's what i like.

Well, as i am already familiar with the mps 430 line, i have been using it lot.

And if i need more i/o, or horse power, i run two together. lol.

I no its not the right way to do it, but, until i decide to breakdown and buy some programmers for pic, or atmel, that's what i will haft to do.

I only wish they were 5v chips.

more horsepower can be realized by simply going to a tiva C or better but still within the TI stable

Freescale has 5V chips I'm working with the KEA64 and that is 5V, actually for me its a bit annoying as all the sensors I sues are 3.3V and the board does not easily give 3.3V but Its a nifty little guy to play around with and comes in a nice case and has the programer built onto the board. It also comes with some tutorials to get you started.

Kas

I have already used Stellaris launchpad Lm4f120(now this series is re-branded as Tiva c), it is good for some heavy tasks(while maintaining low power usage) but as we know technology changes everyday, now my pick will be FRDM-K64F(http://in.element14.com/jsp/search/productdetail.jsp?sku=2406741). This boards supports many features like it's mbed enabled, onboard ethernet controller, sdhc socket, Accelerometer, magnetometer etc. 

Sometimes we wish, they all should be 5v chips and most of the times, they should stay like 3.3v.

I follow microcontrollers closely, but haven't used one in an actual design in a long time.  That's because my main project needs a full-sized 32-bit processor SoC with off-chip memory.  But here are my favorite microcontrollers:

1.  I like the TI MSP430 series.  This is largely nostalgia because the 16-bit instruction set is based on the PDP-11, which I programmed extensively and joyfully in my undergrad days.  The MSP430 even has chips with FRAM to mimic magnetic core memory   I'd love to play with the MSP430 some day.

2.  The STM32 ARM Cortex-M0/M0+/M3/M4 offerings are very nice.  You can get cheap Discovery boards that bring out all the pins, and you can program them over JTAG/SWD and not be stuck with closed-source software.  You'll be able to get Cortex-M7 soon.

3.  I really like the Cypress PSoC 4 and PSoC 5LP hardware.  Unfortunately, you have to use their closed-source software on a Windows PC, which I see as a huge disadvantage.  I keep advocating for Cypress to release the small amount of information needed to create open-source tools.

I like Cypress PSoC4 because it provides the most power for the lowest cost with the best development tools.

I would also like to try a PIC32 Pinguino - powerful MCU, free development tools and no programmer needed.