Hello,
I want to make electronics a hobby (it is a job already as I'm a PhD student in RF/Antenna design).
As the university is not allowing me to go through the labs so I can test my antenna designs, I need to do it from home (without any equipment available for me).
I'll start then by doing a simple PCB Christmas tree using a coin battery (not sure if it is the correct name), some LEDs, a uC and a button. The idea is to have N different blinking routines controlled by the button. While the idea is fairly simple its been like 3-4 years since I last worked with uCs.
So I have a question about the microcontroller. As I want to have panelized PCBs and so several PCBs to solders (i.e: 30 PCBs) using an arduino to program would be expensive (using the arduino to program the atmega, removing from the socket, and adding to the tree PCB) since it'd be 30x1.5€ only for the uCs. So I thought using a OTP microcontroller would be cheaper but very very hard (i.e: Dave's series on Padauk's 3 cent microcontroller)
So I am here asking you on a middle ground between simplicity to program and price for microcontrollers. I wouldn't mind if I had to re-learn C and work a lot on my programming skills but if I can have something programmable through Arduino's IDE or in Python that'd the best case scenario.
Thanks in advance,
-- Guilherme