Any electronic engineers on here ??

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> There are oodles of 8051 tools that run in linux. 

Really ?? YAHOO !! :o)))
But where are they, how comes Synaptic has so little in the 8051
department ?? :-(  

> But if you "hate pics" why would you take up with AVRs  which are, essentially, hyper-pics?

You answer is in the question, they are 'higher' pics ! ;-)
HOnnestly, I have only remotely looked at them, and that was several
years ago. It's all very rusty. Only things that are vivid are the 8051
family, because I learned with them at school, and PIC's, because I
spent a year programming them all days long, and got tired of them.
I was using the 18F876 mostly.
Yes, it was nice programming it in situ, yes it was nice having flash
code memory and on board EEPROM. But the I2C controller was very poor,
the serial port poor too, and interrupt controller as well.
I just happen to find that the peripherals in the 8051 family are better
put together and easier to use.
Also, I can't remember exactly, but I am not sure if the 16F could
address 64K of of external code memory, and the same amount of Data
memory, which any 8051 can, and which is very handy.
When I was programming that 18F876, I remember having to reduce the
functionality of my program, so that I can remove some functions to make
room for others. Not nice.
I assume the 18 serie address this ?

> Pics are dirt cheap and powerful and Microchip tech is very friendly to
> "the little guy" . What's there to hate? The newer ones especially are
> so fast you can emulate the 8051 instruction set with assembler macros
> and it'll still outrun most low end 8051s. 

Ohhh, okay, maybe I will have a close look at their new fancy line, the
18 series. If they can address external memory and have a better
interrupt controller, and better I2C controller, I guess they would be
very interesting indeed, given the cheap price and the cheap easy
programming via the parallel port of the PC. I hope the Linux tools
support them ?

> (disclaimer: I collaborated with Microchip on design of their
> development tools, and I AM a bit biased on this.)

Yes, you do sound biased ;-) But that's understandable... ;o)

Thanks for the info,

Vince