Electronics > Beginners

Help a beginner get started with mcu's

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rstofer:

--- Quote from: agehall on July 12, 2018, 04:13:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: rstofer on July 12, 2018, 03:55:22 pm ---I simply can't use the Arduino IDE.  The text is too small to read on a very high resolution display and I have to mess around and change the colors because I can't see red or orange.  The Arduino IDE is truly trash!

--- End quote ---

I'm not defending Arduino, but you can set the text size and even interface scale, so that shouldn't be a problem...

--- End quote ---

Yes, after spending time on Google, it is possible to fix the GUI.  Some can be fixed in File->Preferences but colors have to be fixed by editing a text file: \Arduino\lib\theme\  The thing is, nobody puts something like color configuration in an external file.  Especially when a large percentage of the adult male population has some form of red-green color deficiency.

There are other IDEs that work a lot better and don't cost anything.  The Arduino IDE is still the standard, almost all project videos will use that GUI.

Old Printer:
About 15 years ago I worked on a hobby project with PICs and model airplane control. Some RF but mostly IR because the models were indoor and very small, and IR is sooo much easier then RF. I bought my TEK 475 and had a ball and built some working systems, but... I had a NASA level engineer holding my hand and doing all the serious work. All I did was copy what he told me to do, and try to understand some of what was going on. I put electronics aside from 2005 until 2016 for life, but when I came back I wondered what this Arduino thing was I kept reading about. It was probably a year before I really got what it was about because I was not much interested in micro controllers. From someone who is learning this alone and on the forums and internet I have to say the Arduino was a stroke of brilliance to introduce mcu's to those of us who electronically don't know their ass from their elbow. As much as it may frustrate the more knowledgeable, it really was a great idea. Anyone can move beyond it any time they are ready and want to, but it does serve a purpose.

rstofer:
There is a very old book, available from Alibris.com, called "Computer Architecture" by Caxton C Foster.  Late in the book he presents the design of a trivial 16 bit minicomputer called "Blue" that might have sold for a few thousand dollars back in the late '60s.  This is not an architectural achievement.  And Blue is the color of the box...

But it is a complete machine expressed in terms of gates and flops ready to run assembly code.  I have never implemented that CPU but I have spent 40+ years thinking about it.  The CPU is truly trivial.

In the following chapter he introduces Indigo and that CPU includes index registers.  A nice upgrade.

It might be worth trying to get a copy of the book although I have no idea how hard that might be to do from Croatia.

http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/the-spartan-blue-cpu-in-verilog/228700593

james_s:
It took me a long time to warm up to the Arduino, but I will say that for all its warts, it has accomplished great things in terms of making microcontrollers accessible to beginners. Even for those of us who are more experienced, I like the inexpensive Arduino clones and widely available libraries because I can quickly hack something together and have it working. It allows me to spend my time on the interesting and/or unique aspects of my project rather than trying to decipher a Chinglish datasheet and bit-bang control some IC or sensor.

HB9EVI:
Personal experience, personal opinion:

I started years ago with the PIC16F in Assembler; I'm sorry to say so, but PIC Assembler sucks; so I tried in C via SDCC, which is pretty crippled due to the ongoing development and the dependency from Microchip headers; in commercial compilers im not interested.

I switched then to the ATMEL Mcus and was much happier since it has a free and opensource library, compiler and burner. I'm no fan of Arduino after all; the code sucks, is undermining the performance of the ATMega chips and the IDE is a pain. It's no big thing to start with plain avr-gcc compatible code and get to use the plain and unlimited power out of the Mcu.

As a step to 32bit-architecture, I tried ATMegaX, but it couldn't convince me, so I ended up with ARM architecture and its exponent STM32; it takes some time to get along with it, since with its headers it's less intuitve than avr-gcc, but it does what it should.

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