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New Hobbyist microcontrollers.
Anyone here playing with microcontrollers, the sort that hobbyists can get ahold of?

I've dabbled with an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi and will again, but kind of want something in the middle. I've already discovered that there are thinks like the Zilog Z180 easily available - and Rabbit have a derivative in a development board. TI's MSP series looks interesting (they have an instruction set similar to the elderly TMS9900) but it's not really much more powerful than the Atmel chips used in Arduinos.

Wade.
New I've thought about it off and on, but haven't kept up with it.
We've got some equipment at work that we want to have more monitoring on (e.g. is the power still on? what's the pressure and temperature here? what's the voltage here?), and dedicating yet another PC to the task is overkill.

Let us know what you find, please!

Cheers,
Scott.
New I will but I was hoping to get ideas from you guys!
New I need to get my arduino kit out again
I got it, made an LED flash a few times, then we got into selling the house and I kinda forgot about it.

I've got one of those kits with all sorts of goodies like an ultrasonic proximity sensor. So I think some spangly lights that turn on with a jedi hand wave might be in order.
New And maybe control a door so it says "psssshhhht" when it opens
--

Drew
New Pi only
Not that I have done a lot with it. I picked one up 2 years ago with the thought of turning it into a remote control for my old telescope but economic circumstances put a damper on that project. Now that I have a decent job again, I'll see if I can get this resurrected. (Thanks for the reminder :-)
New I have done barely anything with my Pi, TBH.
It's sitting on a shelf somewhere with a working Raspbian install. Which I might re-do.

I think my problem was that I didn't have a proper monitor for it and used my projector to set it up, which was somewhat inconvenient. But I need to buy a monitor for another reason soon, so that will help.

Wade.
New Have you looked at Raspberry Pi "Project Book"?
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New I'll give it a gander.
New My TI MSP board came.
It's a MSP430F5529LP. Er. All the numbers and letters do mean something. 25MHz core. 128K Flash, 8Kb SRAM. 16 digital I/O pins, 5 of which can do PWM. 5 Analogue In pins. On-board USB, serial, SPI, I2C, in-circuit debugger (!). It comes pre-installed with a really powerful program that makes it look like both a 60Kb flash storage (in MSC mode) and a keyboard - one of the buttons on the board "types" 'msp430' when you press it. Their website gives you the complete source code to this which is looks like a rather awesome example of what it can do. Beats the pants off the Arudino default demos...

Now to install a development environment and make it do some things of my choosing.

https://www.ti.com/F5529LP

Wade.
New Oh this is cool!
Two main dev tools: CCS (which is TI's) and Energia (which is not).

Energia is based on the Arduino IDE. They've translated or recompiled all the Arduino libraries to run on the MSP. So. Use Energia if you want to code Ardunio-style but on a different micro-controller. I ... did not want to do that.

CCS is TI's environment and supports everything they make. It also has its own libraries which are closer to the hardware than the Energia ones. There are two versions downloadable: the free one which limits you to 8Kb compiled programs and the paid one which does not. The paid one is rumoured to be several hundred dollars, which makes sense: these are actually targetted at people wanting to develop applications where they buy hundreds or thousands of these MSP430 microcontroller ships and put them in their own hardware. The sample projects seem to be a bit more serious than the Arduino samples - they are not "let's do a silly fun thing!" they're "here's how you use this feature". Much more my style.

Interestingly - there is a cloud version of CCS which only needs a browser extension to talk to your device!

Wade.
New Very good. Have fun!
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
     Hobbyist microcontrollers. - (static) - (11)
         I've thought about it off and on, but haven't kept up with it. - (Another Scott) - (1)
             I will but I was hoping to get ideas from you guys! -NT - (static)
         I need to get my arduino kit out again - (pwhysall) - (1)
             And maybe control a door so it says "psssshhhht" when it opens -NT - (drook)
         Pi only - (scoenye) - (1)
             I have done barely anything with my Pi, TBH. - (static)
         Have you looked at Raspberry Pi "Project Book"? - (a6l6e6x) - (1)
             I'll give it a gander. -NT - (static)
         My TI MSP board came. - (static) - (2)
             Oh this is cool! - (static) - (1)
                 Very good. Have fun! -NT - (a6l6e6x)

Sex. Always sex.
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