Question of the Month: What is the most important element when choosing a microcontroller to be used in a project?

Peripherals integrated onto microcontroller is the most important!!

All too true.

I remember when we did work with Motorola 6809 and 68HC11, there was (in 1980 or so money) a Motorola Exorset dev system and a Pentica real time emulator at well over £7k the pair and the IAR C compiler (about £1k).

Others were using HP development tools at several times that price but we weren'y in that league.

Now you can buy an ST debug interface (STLink) for ARM processors for about £20 - and it works better.

Good software is still pricey, and still better in many ways than free stuff.

MK

Good to know. I will think about it when I will buy my next devkit for less than 10 USD.

Back when microprocessors first came out, the development systems were in the thousands of dollars then you had to buy the primitive development software, debuggers and eprom burners, so you could easily spend 10,000 USD just to get a primitive system capability.

I agree on the importance of matching the features with the requirements. I work with payment terminals and PIN pads and a key factor is security. We have to comply with a lot of security standards dictated by the PCI Security Standards Council and EMVCo so we require the microcontroller to have system level protection with secure boot loader, cryptographic hardware accelerators with hardware real random number generator, secure keyboard controllers, fault detection and external tamper sensors, battery backup for key storage, real time clock...interfaces for ISO 7816, NFC and magnetic stripe head. The MAX32555 DeepCover Secure Arm Cortex-M3 Flash Microcontroller is a good candidate.

For the projects that I carry out as a hobbyist, the most important thing for me is that the development tools are free without any additional license cost.

$100 won't get you a peek at the box for one of these !

MK

It is a combination of many factors including availability, price, experience (with microprocessor and tools) and architecture.  I have just finished a job for a client where I could not find any of my normal processors so I ended up get newer part from the same supplier.  This required me to buy an update to my compiler, learn all of the new architecture while attempting to port my existing code onto the new processor.  This ended up taking weeks instead of days and blew any potential profit on this job. Not a great choice.

I was in school around 2000. One of our professors sold an 8051 "dev board" for $99. It had the processor, RAM, ROM, and RS-232 interface. It was only large enough to fit all of those chips.

At the time, I could not believe such an incredible piece of development hardware was so cheap! It was almost 10X cheaper than anything else I could buy.

(Fortunately, at the time, I could use the educational license of Keil, so that took the IDE out of the price discussion.)

Today, if you charged me $100 for a development MCU board, I would expect the packing material to be dollar bills. (Joking, but only slightly.)

I had forgotten how expensive those early development systems were - astronomical for a starving student.

To me the chip price it's very important but also you need to see if the chip has the peripherals and capacity like memory(speed obviously should be below of microseconds)

Victor