Wednesday, March 22, 2006

MAKE Magazine Blog / Dug / BoingBoing

Phillip Torrone was nice enough to post "Blame" to the MAKE Magazine Blog. Yey!

Adding coolness, the MAKE Blog entry was dug on Digg, and also featured on BoingBoing.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Or Maybe AVR?

I'm slowly becoming convinced that AVR chips may be preferable to PIC chips, especially if you are going to use a high-level language like C.

The EDTP Easy Ethernet AVR board has an ATmega16 AVR risc microcontroller with 8 channels of 10-bit A/D. It looks like you only get access to port A (8 pins) and port C (8 pins). Port A is the A/D port, but the Easy Ethernet AVR says there is a 4HCT573 Octal Transparent Latch on port A. I'll have to ask them if they can do analog input on Port A, or else is it a non-starter. The price is OK ($64 kit, $84 assembled).

There also is the Ethernut Board that has an ATmega128 microcontroller. The Ethernut has 20 I/O pins (8 of them A/D). But the price is a little steaper, $138.