Previous Thread: >>2952647Here we discuss microcontrollers (MCUs), single board computers (SBCs), and their accessories, such as Atmel mega and tiny AVRs (Arduinos), PICs, ARM boards such as blue/black pill STM32, ESP8266/32s, RP2040, Raspberry Pi, and others.For general electronics questions (power supplies, level shifting, motor driving, etc.) please ask /ohm/.>where can I find verified quality microcontrollers and other electronic sensors or partsdigikey.commouser.comarrow.comnewark.com>but that's too expensivealiexpress.com (many parts here are fake, particularly specific parts out of stock in the above sites)lcsc.com>I need a part that does X and Y, with Z specifications. How can I find it?use DigiKey's or Octopart's parametric part search. Then purchase from one of the sellers listed above.>how do I get started with microcontrollers, where should I start?There is no defined starting point, grab a book and start reading or buy an arduino off ebay/amazon and start messing around. There are a plethora of examples online to get started.>resources:https://github.com/kitspace/awesome-electronics>RISC-V microcontroller list:https://codeberg.org/20-100/Awesome_RISC-V/raw/branch/master/RISC-V_MCU_development_boards.pdf
>>2973477The Apple IIe, Commodore 64, and Atari 800 XL only have a single board. That count?How about the Cardputer?
>>2973488>CardputerIt's missing a flashlight and VTech logo.
There was a kit people could use to build a functioning ZX Spectrum from a new PCB, full of new chips, while skipping over a rare part that is not longer manufactured anymore. Apparently the main person that sold the kit has passed away as of December.
>>2973488Those simple early 8-bit computers were partially made for hobbyists to mess about with programming and other computing novelty, and that's all they're useful for now. So the same market as a raspberry pi.
>>2973477Relevant news site:https://linuxgizmos.com/>>2973556>and that's all they're useful for now.This is wrong. About 200 million 6502 cores are made annually.>So the same market as a raspberry pi.Also wrong. Half the RPi volume goes to the embedded market.
>>2973567>This is wrong. About 200 million 6502 cores are made annually.Those are not the Apple 2, Commodore 64, or Atari "single board computer"s that the OP was talking about, in the same way that an x86 dev-board has different uses to an x86 CPU on a PC or industrial terminal, even if they're the same CPU.>Half the RPi volumeFair enough, but what matters is the half of the market of the raspberry pi that's relevant to this general.>6502>the embedded marketAren't the 6502s themselves used for industrial embedded applications in a similar vein to raspberry pis? That just makes them even more similar to one another.
Hell yeah, got the digispark working exactly as intended. It’s David Carne’s ipod TRRS in-line remote protocol, I just took the code and ported it to the tiny85. The details are on archive.org. Just needed a few different pin assignments, and a bit of messing about with the clock frequency and timers. The fast PWM is pretty cool. Anyhow the code uses zero RAM and just 228B of progmem, so let alone a tiny85 it would fit on a tiny13. But I wanted to avoid ICSP and to have something compact to use with a panel-mount USB B socket for power (and ideally programming), soldering USB wires to the 4 pads on a digispark seems like the easiest and cheapest way to go. Since it will also be plugged into my PC, this also gives me the ability to change the programming whenever I want.
>>2973477 What cool new project can I realized with it?
>>2973911The EPROM? A really long-exposure camera.
>>2973921Tell me more, friend.
>>2973923The window in the EPROM chip is used to erase the memory (sets it to all 1s I believe) so if you write all zeroes and expose it to an image, you’ll be able to read the image back from the erasure pattern. You could just do a fixed exposure and read the bits afterwards, but I’d read it continuously to see how long it takes each bit/pixel to change, and use that as brightness information. Arguably you could extract temporal information too, making a video from all of the pixel changes each sample. It will be very slow though.People have done similar things with DRAM chips by removing their lids, but they’re much faster. Because DRAM cells need to be refreshed constantly to keep the data stored, if you shine light on the cells it will cause them to drain light faster, and so flip their bits faster. I think. Probably pretty tough to delid a modern epoxy encapsulated DRAM IC without breaking the bond-wires though, I’m guessing they did it on ceramic or metal hermetic packages, the ones with the gold soldered-on lids.
I am intrigued enough by the new PIC32CM PL10 series from Microchip to have the dev board on order (and I already have some chips but my jtag tooling is old and crappy enough that I need an adapter for SWD) but besides the neat factor of having an M0+ core and AVR peripherals and pinout wth the weirdness of PIC32 branding, I'm not sure who this is really for. If I got stuck with sustaining work on an AVR design and needed to move to a more modern chip, I'd just go to a more modern AVR. If I were doing a greenfield design, I'm not sure I would pick these over SAMD or STM32. But they sure are neat. It's the sort of thing I would have expected in the PIC32 line maybe two years after the Atmel acquisition, not now.
>>2973992Micron made a windowed DRAM chip for basic imaging back in the eighties. It was a thing even earlier than that - I remember seeing the trick in "build your own robot" books from the seventies.
how do I get a job doing this stuff I built the 8-bit breadboard computer I don’t want to build websites anymore that shit is so boring. I’m learning kicad and about programming microcontrollers, and FPGAs. How do I start paying my rent? If I make something like this guy did is that enough to get me a job?https://github.com/Nicholas-L-Johnson/flip-card
>>2974282Learn to write a good cover letter where you basically say that in corporatese. People usually land in embedded in early mid career anyway; they complain the median age in the field is something like 50 but I remember it being that way in 1999. It's always been a bit of a domain of greybeards.In bigger organizations there will be a hardware/software split so you should decide where you want to specialize.
