I've decided to start playing with microcontrollers again. I just needed to choose which platform I would play with...
I was a fan of the Motorola series of microprocessors and controllers. I've played with the 6803, 6809, 6811, and most recently, the '908. My last '908 project used the HC908 Daughter card from Midnight Design Solutions (then an American QRP club project). It's a great card in that it brings out all the I/O pins to a couple of headers but it has to be programmed in assembly.
Since then, Motorola split and its chip division became Freescale Semiconductor. It seems the Freescale is more interested in commercial uses and the hobbyist had to struggle with programming individual chips . Sure, there were programmers, but I was too cheap to buy one and too afraid to build one.
About 10 years passed. The Microchip PIC series grew in popularity but it never sparked my interest.
Enter the Arduino! It was built from the ground up to be easy to program and get stuff connected (their goal is to get the non-techies interested in using their boards). The boards are based on the Atmel series of processors but that is not important as their C++ based programming language hides all that (mostly). Libraries are available on the net for all sorts of hardware interfacing.
The Arduino IDE runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is very straight-forward and they give a bunch of examples. Here's what I love about it: hack some code in the IDE, click on the download button, and the code is compiled, transferred to the board, and starts running. Easy, easy, easy!
You can purchase the boards directly from the Arduino folks in Italy and other electronic hobbyist sites like SparkFun and Adafruit sell them (and since the hardware is open source, these guys even have their own boards). Even Radio Shack stores in the USA have them on their shelves. I even bought a couple of boards from them which is shocking since I haven't bought anything from RS in years.
So far, the IDE and built-in bootloader have been great. If I outgrow the tools, I guess I could try to deal with the Atmel chips themselves or maybe I'll use some of those left over '908 chips I have lying around...
