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

dychen

e14 Question of the Month

We're interested in finding out what considerations are most important to you when choosing a microcontroller. Take the poll and let us know, and please tell us why in the Comments section below!

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  • in reply to dougw

    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.)

  • in reply to baldengineer

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

    image

    Slight smile

    MK

  • in reply to dougw

    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.

  • in reply to DAB

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

  • in reply to DAB

    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