New Microcontrollers Received!!

New Microcontrollers Received!!
Today I received samples of new microcontroller AT89S2051 from Atmel. This new microcontroller is an advanced version of popular AT89C2051. This new version is ISP compatible and has new features. The microcontroller is not formally released yet by Atmel.
Making background is my MSP430 Header board design! :-)

Epson Develops the World's First Flexible 8-Bit Asynchronous Microprocessor

Seiko Epson Corp. ("Epson") has announced that it has developed the world's first*1 flexible 8-bit asynchronous microprocessor using low-temperature polysilicon thin-film transistors (LTPS-TFTs) on a plastic substrate. With energy consumption reduced by 70% compared to the synchronous microprocessors now in everyday use, Epson is now researching potential applications for its invention. The results of Epson's research were announced at ISSCC2005, the International Solid-State Circuit Conference, held earlier this month in San Francisco in the United States.
Epson Corporate: Newsroom

FAT16 Interface for MSP430

Following up on the last post about storage for microcontrollers, I found this article very interesting.

FAT16 Interface for MSP430

If I find time, I would like to experiment with the SD cards that I have. It would be nice to have a small PCB with SD Slot, a decoupling cap and a SIL header. That way it can be put on a breadboard and can be experimented with.

SD / MMC memory extension for Microcontrollers

To add storage space to microcontrollers is very easy with Secure Digital cards. SD Card Association site has a Physical layer specification document that describes the card very briefly. It does not explain the full protocol specification though.

Why use SD Card? Using SD cards with microcontrollers has a few advantages. First of all it is very cheap. You can find very good deals on 64MB cards. I bought mine for less than $2. Secondly the access protocol is very similar to a 3 wire bus / SPI.

Here are some examples of interfacing the SD cards to various popular microcontrollers.

• PIC memory extension
  
• Interfacing PIC to SD card C - sample code
  
• SD interface for MSP430
  
• MMC to Serial Adapter
  
• Interfacing SD card to Sharp Microcontrollers
  

Bob Blick

Found another great site for PIC based projects.
Bob Blick's Projects

Some of the projects like the propeller Clock and LCD Term are nice.

• Propeller Clock
  
• LCDterm
  

MicroSyl MCU

While searching for some clock projects, I found this wonderful site

MicroSyl MCU


This site has many exciting AVR microcontroller based projects like:

• Propeller Clock
  
• Bar Code Reader made out of Cue Cat :-)
  
• MP3 Player
  
• LCD Libraries
  
• etc...
  

This site does not provide much text on the projects, just the schematic and the C source code. Also the author hasn't mentioned which C compiler he uses. I'll see if I can email the author.

First PIC Blog

Victor Fraenckel posted a question on PIC List

"Are there any PIC related blogs out there?"


Well, I didn't see any so I created this one!