Development Tools and Solutions

RE: Real-time Audio Spectrum Analyzer using a PIC 8-bit microcontroller

messages@element14.com — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:46:51 GMT

Impressive project!

I'm trying to hash out issues with real-time audio processing tasks on an Arduino without even having to worry about a nice display like that. Although, looking at his PIC code, I see the 8-bitter is running at 48MHz - pretty zippy.

Cheers,

Drew

RE: Real-time Audio Spectrum Analyzer using a PIC 8-bit microcontroller

messages@element14.com — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 20:37:26 GMT

Nice job!

RE: Microstick from Microchip

messages@element14.com — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:46:46 GMT

It is a nice board indeed! But I can't understand why is it so limited to support only two parts?

Supported Parts:

dsPIC33FJ64MC802

PIC24HJ64GP502

RE: STM32 value line Discovery board

messages@element14.com — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 11:33:49 GMT

I would love to try it, but our product manager is hiding all the samples

I do agree with John's thoughts regarding open source developement and hobbyists. The main stumbling block out there for this kind of dev kit is its use of SWD as opposed to full J-Tag until either OpenOCD or other such projects manage to implement SWD.

RE: STM32 value line Discovery board

messages@element14.com — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:04:30 GMT

It does look like a good board, especially at that price. The choice of IDEs for it is an improvement compared to the last board they released. This is however still the one thing that puts me off, the available IDEs are all still windows only. For a board aimed at beginners and essentially hobbyists, it isn't that friendly. Not everyone runs windows and products like this may as well be putting off a reasonable corner of the market. Sure there may be around this limit, but are beginners really going to spend the time trying to get it working? These companies are missing out here, but thats just my opinion.

As for useability, the packages are good. The explanations of the standard code example is good, but could be improved for some of the other features. As you would expect for a low cost product, the support is essentially limited to the FAQs, manual and a forum. Good if you have previous experience with this kind of platform, anyone else may have a hard time. At least, thats what I thought from my experience with the STM8 Discovery.

Over all, a good cheap platform, however some improvements could be made for the beginners market and the IDE side.

RE: FTDI replaces DB9 RS232 connectors with DB9-USB-RS232 modules

messages@element14.com — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:03:34 GMT

These units would make a nice RoadTest ... I'd definitely like to try one of these out!

It looks like they cost around $27.75 US Dollars ... not a cheap solution -- but could find a use in migrating older boards to newer connectivity (without having to re-design an existing board).

Here is the link to the datasheet: http://www.ftdichip.com/Documents/DataSheets/Modules/DS_DB9-USB-RS232.pdf

Gregory