ORIGINAL: dknovick
ORIGINAL: krimo
I haven't tried the Atmel AVR yet. Is there a "low-cost" evaluation/development kit offered/available that has an included compiler/assembler. And, if you want to upgrade the compiler that comes with the eval/dev kit is it expensive?
I'm a PIC fanboy...
(but I like Atmel's as well)
The nice thing about Atmel, is that you can use the gcc compiler: [link=http://winavr.sourceforge.net/]WINAVR[/link]
[link=http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php]Sparkfun[/link] has a nice selection of programmers and eval. boards
ORIGINAL: krimo
Currently I'm looking for a microcontroller that has lots (~40) GPIO lines and can produce pulse widths approaching (1/32.768MHz) or 30.5175 ns with an included 32-bit data bus. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to be forced to use an FPGA to make this happen because the high end microcontrollers have a feature set that seemingly is not oriented for control but for multimedia and internet applications and the compilers that support the high end devices are expensive.
Both Microchip and Atmel have 32 bit microcontrollers and lots of I/O. I'm not sure on the timing, but a quick look at their website, says PICs will run at 80MHz and the Atmels @ 66MHz
Thanks for the info. However, I believe Microchip and Atmel 32-Bit microcontrollers with advertised 66-Mhz or 80-Mhz clocks refers to the internal instruction execution rate not I/O speed. I'll take a look at Microchip and Atmel micro offerings and maybe email the manufacturer to find out what maximum frequency their GPIO lines can reach.
By the way, how "buggy" is WinAVR? Have you had good experiences with it?