How to choose a MicroController

Step 11 Intel 8051 and variants

Intel invented the 8051 architecture a long time ago, and garnered some hobbyist interest with the 8052BASIC chip, which contained a basic interpretter in masked ROM and allowed one to build a very small BASIC based computer. Since then the architecture has been licensed and/or stolen by MANY vendors, and good things have happened to it. It's been shrunk, expanded, speeded up, made lower power, had peripherals added, increased memory, flash and eeprom (and even ferromagnetic ram) added. Most variants are somewhat harder to find than PIC or AVR chips.

Comments

[VIRON]

I'm a big fan of 8052AH-BASIC since it doesn't need a PC to program it, you program it an save on eprom or possibly small flash. Now considering Parallax Propeller because of it's video capabilities, although I've managed to push video out of the 8052:

[westfw]

Yeah, I've been a bit surprised that the 8052-basic idea hasn't spread to some of the more modern controllers. One of those ARMs with 8k+ of on-chip ram plus 64k+ flash ought to make a dandy single-chip basic interpreter, and even something like the the Atmel Butterfly should run one reasonably well. You'd think that by now someone would have written "portable basic-8052 interpreter in C" that would compile on a number of micros to 16k+ of code. The old 8052 programmers would all snicker "it fit in 8k on a real 8052", and all the ARM and AVR programmers would go "I don't care because my 32k AVR is cheaper than your 8k 8052 was anyway". I haven't seen anything, though. Basic interpreters seem to be very out-of-style these days, except at Parallax...

[VIRON]

The "Hydra Game console" system has a basic for Parallax Propeller and it reminds me of the ATARI 800, but just enough to make your own games or other unique GUI front ends, plus some nice network and storage features. The kit costs 20x as much as the chip so I'll probably start with the chip.