




Step 1: What IS a "Microcontroller" ?


  • Memory. Where the computer stores data and instructions




<p>I am totally new in the MicroController thing. I have some experience in music electronics and basic programming.</p><p>Now im looking for a small solution to add sampling to my Guitar. It would have 6-8 simple keyboard switches that trigger a sample from an SD-Card that then goes out to a simple audio jack output. Also it should be able to power three leds (only one active at a time). Programming doesnt need too much memory since all it will do is: two buttons allow to go up and down through the three banks. The other buttons are each assigned to one audio sample on the sd card for each bank. The leds show which of the three preset banks are active. The other 4-6 buttons trigger the sample, pull it from the card and play it to the audio jack.</p><p>What kind of microcontroller could you recommend for this kind of purpose? </p><p>thanks in advance for your help.</p><p>greetings</p>
Your &quot;programming&quot; is more complicated than you think because both reading an SD card and playing the data as audio are relatively complicated tasks. A number of Arduino users have been surprised by &quot;all I do is serve up SD files on a web server (SD library plus ethernet library: similar complexity) and my memory is almost gone!&quot;<br>An arduino-like board would probably work OK, but something like a PJRC &quot;Teensy 3.2&quot; would give you a lot of breathing room (and it has an excellent audio library!)<br><br>I really need to update this instructable to reflect the changes in the &quot;microcontroller decision process&quot; that have occurred since (and because of) the Arduino popularization!
<p>thanks for actually taking your time to reply.</p><p>Yeah, i looked up a lot of videos and articles on the whole process of reading sd cards and playing audio. I found a good video on how to do the sd/microcontroller communication through serial peripheral interface. (so at least i no im looking for a controller with SDI/SDA and SDC pins) It also explains the whole wakeup and communication protocols to actually read and write data onto the sd. The whole playing audio business is what gives me a headache right now. I am a luthier and don't have any kind of background in computer sciences, except a bit of playing around in c++ and basic.</p><p>I actually started out by thinking about getting an arduino clone but for my purposes every inch of space i can save is a big plus. Thank you very much for the recommendation. I will order one Teensy and just try to figure out the whole thing step by step. If you ever get around to writing a follow-up on your article i would be very interested to give it a read.</p>
<p>I am working on my FYP, in which i am using some sensors, dc stepper motor, a ziggbee. </p><p>this is my first experience working on microcontroller i haven't any idea about microcontrollers. my instructor gave me two option either go with PICmicrocontroller or AVR. can any one tell me which one i should use??????? that would easy for me.</p>
<p>Tech Online &quot;Virtual Labs&quot; does not exists anymore!<br>Good article, but it is still difficult how to select. For example what about ESP8266? How to compare with other chips. It will be good, if there is comparison table.</p>
Yes, this article is almost 8 years old now. It was supposed to have put forth some general principles that a hobbyist might use to select a microcontroller, rather than get into a &quot;x is better than y&quot; debate. And those principles were supposed to stay reasonably accurate regardless of changes in specific products. To some extent, I think this was a success, and I'm not at all interested in trying to maintain a comparison table of everything that exists, especially if you want to include chips/modules that have traditionally not been documented in English or sold in the US.<br><br>On the other hand, I think the question has changed somewhat. Today, whether you use a single chip or a module-scale product has become a much more significant issues, and the breadth of the &quot;modules&quot; has become very large. For many hobbyists, the decision now is &quot;Arduino or Raspberry Pi&quot;, rather than &quot;AVR vs ARM&quot;...<br>
nice article but i am still confused wat to choose microcontroller or microprocessor??? <br>I am a final year student working on my FYP project, which contains 9 resistive type sensors, 5 contact sensors and 2 accelemeter or Gyro.also i have to use a display to show output and Speaker with text to speech converter. now wat should i use??? microcontroller or microprocessor???
The original article is getting a bit old, but...<br>OK. It sounds like you need 9 A-D channels with relatively slow sample rates, 5 digital inputs, I2C or SPI for the Accel/gyro, some sort of display interface (which can range from one pin with an external intelligent display of some kind, to &quot;many&quot; pins dedicated to AMLCD displays), and your text-to-speech (are you using an external text-to-speech module, or do you want your project to generate audio directly?)<br>This is enough 'stuff' that you can immediately eliminate some candidates; an Arduino Uno, or the microcontroller it uses, is probably not enough, for example.<br>The &quot;microprocessor&quot; vs &quot;microcontroller&quot; issue is usually determined by memory use, and you don't say anything about what your software needs to do or how big you expect it to be. You can get microprocessor systems with megabytes to gigabytes of RAM, while it's a rare microcontroller than has more than 64k.<br>A big question is &quot;chips or module&quot; - A beaglebone will probably do everything you need, if you're &quot;allowed&quot; to use a pre-built system like that (with some added stuff for specific sensors, plus software.) OTOH, a Beaglebone is probably above the complexity of what you would be expected to build for this class of project.
<p>Wow, answering that ... your self control must be amazing; hats off!</p>
<p>i am working on a project in which i need to to produce an interface b/w 2 usp ports for data transfer.plz suggest which micro controller will meet me requirements </p>
<p>Insufficient information. Insufficient spelling. I assume you mean 2 USB &quot;things&quot;, since USB is more of a network connection, and you don't actually transfer data &quot;between two USB ports.&quot; It becomes highly dependent on what types of &quot;things.&quot;</p><p>An FTDI VNC2 microcontroller will probably do it, but it may not be the easiest solution. And it's sorta weird in several ways.</p>
<p>Thank you for the information and code of ethics. Here are some extra information about getting free samples.</p><p><a href="http://www.ladyada.net/library/procure/samples.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ladyada.net/library/procure/samples.htm...</a></p><p>My blog </p><p><a href="http://embedded-egypt.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://embedded-egypt.blogspot.com/</a></p>
HAPPY BIRTHDAY article - you turn 7 years old today! ;-) <br>What a great write up this is - but/and may I humbly suggest a revision? I'm guessing quite a few things have happened in 7 years. For instance, the Arduino mention probably deserves some more prominence to name one thing. <br>Again, thank you! <br>&lt;:-)
This instructable offers a set of guidelines for choosing a microcontroller, it can't (and *I* can't) recommend a particular micro for every application that comes along... That said, any sort of image processing usually moves into the realm of needing multiple megabytes of memory, rather than the &quot;several kbytes&quot; that you see on most microcontrollers. That probably means that you'd be best off with one of the newer &quot;single board computers&quot; like Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone. (In fact, there is/was a BeagleBoard variant <a href="http://leopardboard.org" rel="nofollow">LeopardBoard</a> specifically designed for experimenting with various camera modules.&nbsp; It's a bit old and expensive by RPi standards, but not horribly so...)<br>
We were discussing this very topic on the Digi-Key TechXchange forums the other day: http://www.digikey.com/techxchange/thread/4280. If you need help selecting a microcontroller for a specific project, the folks there are a big help!
I'm not sure if anyone will read this instructable, or this comment, any time soon... But I must warn you. Stay away from Zilog. To put it nicely, actually *using* their chips is... not easy. <br> <br>I've tried to diagnose the problem, but their help desk is no help and by this time (2012) they haven't updated most of their line. It is sad, because a lot of the chips actually have fairly nice features (high drive IO pins, to name one that is hard to find, and a good amount of timers, something I've only seen on SiLabs 8051s) but are impossible to use off of the development boards. <br> <br>If anyone has solved these problems... I've got some ZNEO motor control &micro;Cs laying around I still want to use. Help!
After doing a very small project using PIC16F870 and doing a big project using ATmega8, I've written a comparison between AVR and PIC on my blog: <br> <br>http://my.opera.com/CrazyTerabyte/blog/2011/09/08/comparison-between-microchip-pic-and-atmel-avr-microcontrollers <br> <br>I hope it's useful for other people as well. <br> <br>TL;DR: In my opinion, AVR is better than PIC.
go for p89v51rd2 make a simple development board interfacing max232, it is d best<br>
I've use ST ARM module. STM32VL Discover kit very Succesfull. http://www.signal.com.tr/arananurun.php?urun=STM32VLDISCOVER&amp;&amp;id=129339
What about the STM32F103 series? Not so hobbist-friendly because they don't have DIP packages, but they seem to be very reasonably priced (cents more than 8-bit atmega48v) and a performance beast, having 32-bit ARM cores and reaching 72 MHz. I have no idea if are there free IDEs and cheap ways of &quot;burning&quot; the mcus, though. Anyone ever had any experience with them?
You understand that you need the microcontroller from the keyboard (that &quot;maybe&quot; is the correct type), PLUS an EPROM (and maybe RAM) chip that you have to buy, plus a couple of &quot;glue&quot; chips and a couple dozen wires or a PCB to connect it all. It's sort of an entertaining exercise if you've harvested the components from trash, and the alternative is $30 &quot;new&quot; chips (that still need those extra components), but that has long since ceased to be the case. Even if you were to want to experiment with the older architectures, the cost for a flash version of the 8052 (new) is about $2 (http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&amp;name=AT89S52-24PU-ND )<br>
very nice article and fair review, <br>i've been using PIC AVR Zilog and now Rabbit
I use ARM microcontroller.<br><br><br>Regards,<br>Dave T.<br><a href="http://www.tokomikon.com">ATmega8535</a> | <a href="http://www.tokomikon.com">ATmega16</a> | <a href="http://www.tokomikon.com">ATmega32</a> | <a href="http://www.tokomikon.com">AVR USB ISP</a> Seller<br>
Thanks for the info. I really like free stuff!
Thanks for all the information. It really helped me out.
This is instructable is just what the doctor ordered. I want to get into microcontrollers and spent several hours reading piecemeal accounts trying to gather enough information before I&nbsp;found this most excellent write up. I should have know that Instructables was the place to start. <br /> <br /> FYI - this link is broken: <a href="http://www.geocities.com/westfw/trip-report-msp430.txt" rel="nofollow">&quot;Trip report to an Early TI seminar</a>&quot;<br /> <br /> Double Plus Good.<br />
Thanks!&nbsp; Broken link fixed (geocities went away...)<br /> <br />
RIP geocities<br /> You will be missed T_T<br />
Another bad link.<br /> Step 10.<br /> <a href="http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?module=Freaks%20Devices&amp;func=viewDev" rel="nofollow">Device list at AVR Freaks</a><br />
honestly, this instructable was mostly about relatively SMALL microcontrollers, where most of the electronics of the entire project is in the single chip. Your project sounds more complex than that (and not at all an ideal introduction to microcontrollers or hardware in general for a person with your background.)<br> <br> You could look at the modules that claim to run JAVA or JAVA-like programs, for example: <a href="http://www.systronix.com/store/tini.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.systronix.com/store/tini.html</a><br> Or linux/android Single-board computers (Beagleboard ?)<br> Or even a conventional laptop or DC-powered PC-class machine, perhaps with things like Arduinos to use for real-world interfacing...<br> <br>
double post :)
Huh. It WASN'T, it had different text. Honest...<br> Anyway: that link isn't bad, it's just (now) an empty page (with a referral to a relevant page at Atmel.) There are hints that it might come back, so I want to leave the link here alone...

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