Getting OT - Microcontrollers, was Re: Remapping the HP150 keyboard

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Tony Duell wrote:
> 
> 
> > Last time I looked at the BASIC Stamp, you wrote the program on a PC and 
> > compiled it to a pseudocode that was downloaded to the Stamp and 
> > interpretted there. I have no idea of the performance of that, the 
> > documetnation that was available didn't seem to go to a low enough level 
> > to work it out.
> 
> I don't know why people are so fond of the BASIC Stamp.  It seems to add 

Nor do I. Most of what I do with microcontrollers is essentaily 
complicated bit-twiddling, and it's easier to do that in assembly 
language where you then haev a good idea what the chip should be doing


> One of the reasons I ditched PIC in favour of AVR is that the avr-gcc 
> toolchain is far more robust than any of the PIC assemblers.  The PIC, 
> however, is a very very simple processor and you could knock up an 
> assembler for it on any machine you liked in an afternoon.  Anyway, I 
> thought you had a 486 running Linux?

I do. Which means I can run PIC, 8048 and 8051 cross-assemblers, and I 
assume there's an AVR one too (if not, I could write one). But I didn't 
think the STAMP toolkit came for linux, and I didn't think the STAMP ws 
sufficiently-well documented to write your own tools.

-tony