First, I apologize for not responding sooner. It's a bit of a hit and miss for following forums for me.
Thanks, I did not know it was not a good architecture from the assembly programmer's view. What MCU architectures do you like and would consider the best, of 8 or 16 bit MCUs that still have DIP packages available?
I did some assembly for school project only, and I liked the mnemonics of the Z80 a lot better then the 8085, even though the binaries were mostly compatible (Z80 had some nice extra index registers and shadow registers, but those were not often used. 6802 was apparently popular but I never used it.
But more important: I stopped using assembler over 20 years ago. Any decent uC family has at least one viable C compiler these days, and writing code in C instead of assembly is a huge productivity improvement. C is also easier to learn then assembly. A program written in C is also mostly portable between different uC architetures. You have to abstract out machine dependent code such as direct register writes, but generic algorithms can be ported quite easily.
I am not qualified to try to design a PCB, I am getting back into electronics after many years of being away from it, and I am having to relearn almost from the beginning.
In the last 30 years, "electronics" has changed gianormously. Electronics and computer magazines were very popular back then, and now a lot have seized to exist, and the remaining ones are struggling. Back then assembly was widely used, but the reason for it was that there simply were no better tools available. When better tools (such as C compilers) became available, a lot of excuses were invented by the assembler lovers to justify sticking to their own trade. Back then, the few C compilers that did exist, were also much less advanced then they are now. They have been continuously improved and are still improving.
It is a whole different world. Take for example an ESP32. You can write a program with a size of 2 pages, pull in some libraries, and then communicate over WiFi with some other uC or PC that speaks WiFi too. There are many thousandths of IC's you can add to a microcontroller board, and there are thousands of small libraries you can use to talk to such an IC, over whatever interface that IC supports (often SPI, I2C or some custom serial protocol).
I say that re-starting now with learning assembly for an 8051 is a waste of time. Put the same effort into learning C and you can quite easily switch between 20 or so different microcontroller architectures. And you can re-use code distributes via sites such as github and gitlab. There are hundreds of thousands of projects over there. Many uC's have small breakout boards available that you can simply stick on a breadboard, and that is all you need. Some work with bootloaders. for others you pay EUR5 for such a board, and EUR3 for a programmer.
I wonder, what sort of research have you done before starting this thread? Where are your interests?
Was it just "I once did asm on 8051 and I want to do it again", or other reasons?
I am not qualified to try to design a PCB,
This is also a topic you do not have to be afraid of.
There is no "qualification" needed for starting to design a PCB. 12 year old kids can start designing PCB's these days. I use KiCad myself. It's a quite capable PCB design suite, and it is fully open source and free software. Just install it and start practicing. If you want to do anything with electronics, you probably want to draw some schematics too. And then you are already 30% along the route to the PCB. Also, when you design your own PCB, it is easy to work with SMT parts (0805 is an easy "size" for resistors and capacitors to start with). I find SMT easier to handle then the old wired parts. All that bending and cutting of leads was a lot of work. And and turning the PCB and working with "straight" and "mirror image" layout was a bit nuisance for me.
And also, once you've designed a PCB, you can simply order them online. Single layer PCB's are nearly extinct (Except for mass produced FR2). You can order PCB's for around EUR2 (each) these days, and for that money you get double sided PCB with plating, two solder masks and two silkscreens.
I do do not know what your reasons are for wanting to stick with ASM on 8051. If that is all you want, then go for it. But if your main intention is to "do something fun with electronics". Then look around a bit first and then choose something more modern.
There are lots of sites to learn about electronics, and demo's of (possible) projects. Hackaday.com is a good start, but just browsing youtube is also an option. Several of the old magazines also still exist, and they often have a forum and a section with projects made by their members.
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