Processor Roundup

I've spent a lot of time over the last months checking out microcontrollers and low-power microprocessors, trying to figure out which ones fit my needs best... and the answer is (of course) that it depends on exactly which needs those are.  However, these are my selections:

Tiny:  Atmel AVRs.  Mostly because I am familiar with them and find them very easy to use.  For the most part, I don't see much reason to bother with 8-bit microcontrollers any more, but sometimes it's handy to plug in a little one to perform some simple function, and occasionally only a 5v rail is readily available, so they still have some uses.  AVR Studio is a nice development environment.

Tiny (alternate):  The little 8-bit PICs are cheaper... if I were ever to be in a situation where it meant a lot to me to save a few cents, that would be the way to go!

Simple, cheap, low power: Silicon Labs Geckos.  First of all because of their amazing power consumption, and second because of the amount of RAM and FLASH they cram in for the price.

General purpose:  STMicroelectronics STM32.  The STM32Cube/MX code generator / library thing is really nice now that it finally supports most of the chips, and there is such a huge range of features and packages... great stuff.  All else being equal I would reach for one of these.  I've been using the CooCox development environment to write code for these, which is pretty nice and free, although it takes a bit of effort to get it to work nicely with STM32Cube...

Powerful microcontroller: At $9, NXP's LPC4330 is one crazy chip!  Huge amount of RAM (264k), dual ARM cores running up to 204 MHz, SDRAM controller, LCD controller,floating point hardware, and the insane Serial GPIO subsystem make this thing a geek's dream come true... plus a 144-LQFP package that provides all the pins I could possibly need and still be solderable without major drama.  Writing code for it may be a rather steep learning curve, though.  Disadvantage: no on-chip FLASH (which isn't a huge deal, but it adds even more complication).

Next level:  I really really like Freescale's 128-LQFP i.MX233 processor.  This is right on the border of what I think I can work with at this point... much more on this chip in future posts!

Crazy power: Since someday I want to make a full-featured oscilloscope and other high-end gear, I'll want all the processing power I can get for those projects (budget is an issue though!).  Looking at the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, Allwinner A20 system-son-module, and the i.MX6.  No real think too hard about it at this point though!