Skip to main content

How to Pick a Microcontroller For Beginner

http://www.sureshjoshi.com/embedded/how-to-pick-a-microcontroller/

Many months ago when I was on vacation, I had a chat with the fantastic people behind SnapEDA about my heavily opinionated thoughts around how to pick a microcontroller (aside: if you’re a hardware designer and you’ve never used SnapEDA – sign up for free and watch your life instantaneously become easier). They briefly wrote about those thoughts in their Top 10 Microcontrollers post.

Here we are about 6 months later, and I thought it would be good to re-visit some of those opinions. I’ve just selected a few new microcontrollers for some projects, so I’ve gone through these decisions again recently.
There are a multitude of factors to keep in mind when picking an MCU, but the problem is that there are usually TOO many factors, and it’s easy to get stuck into an “analysis paralysis” situation.
Below are a subset of design considerations when choosing an MCU, but you’ll notice that I dismiss some of them entirely.

http://www.sureshjoshi.com/embedded/how-to-pick-a-microcontroller/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Logic Analyzer with STM32 Boards

https://sysprogs.com/w/how-we-turned-8-popular-stm32-boards-into-powerful-logic-analyzers/ How We Turned 8 Popular STM32 Boards into Powerful Logic Analyzers March 23, 2017 Ivan Shcherbakov The idea of making a “soft logic analyzer” that will run on top of popular prototyping boards has been crossing my mind since we first got acquainted with the STM32 Discovery and Nucleo boards. The STM32 GPIO is blazingly fast and the built-in DMA controller looks powerful enough to handle high bandwidths. So having that in mind, we spent several months perfecting both software and firmware side and here is what we got in the end. Capturing the signals The main challenge when using a microcontroller like STM32 as a core of a logic analyzer is dealing with sampling irregularities. Unlike FPGA-based analyzers, the microcontroller has to share the same resources to load instructions from memory, read/write th...

The Difference Between LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition (#31313) and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 (#45544)

http://robotsquare.com/2013/11/25/difference-between-ev3-home-edition-and-education-ev3/ This article covers the difference between the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 products. Other articles in the ‘difference between’ series: * The difference and compatibility between EV3 and NXT ( link ) * The difference between NXT Home Edition and NXT Education products ( link ) One robotics platform, two targets The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robotics platform has been developed for two different target audiences. We have home users (children and hobbyists) and educational users (students and teachers). LEGO has designed a base set for each group, as well as several add on sets. There isn’t a clear line between home users and educational users, though. It’s fine to use the Education set at home, and it’s fine to use the Home Edition set at school. This article aims to clarify the differences between the two product lines so you can decide which...

Building a portable GSM BTS using the Nuand bladeRF, Raspberry Pi and YateBTS (The Definitive and Step by Step Guide)

https://blog.strcpy.info/2016/04/21/building-a-portable-gsm-bts-using-bladerf-raspberry-and-yatebts-the-definitive-guide/ Building a portable GSM BTS using the Nuand bladeRF, Raspberry Pi and YateBTS (The Definitive and Step by Step Guide) I was always amazed when I read articles published by some hackers related to GSM technology. H owever , playing with GSM technologies was not cheap until the arrival of Software Defined Radios (SDRs), besides not being something easy to be implemented. A fter reading various articles related to GSM BTS, I noticed that there were a lot of inconsistent and or incomplete information related to the topic. From this, I decided to write this article, detailing and describing step by step the building process of a portable and operational GSM BTS. Before starting with the “hands on”, I would like to thank all the pioneering Hackers and Researchers who started the studies related to previously closed GSM technology. In part...