On Fri, 15 May 1998, Lawrence Lile wrote:

> I wish for a US$0.25  microcontroller.  I don't care how slow, how
> few pins, how little memory, how few peripherals, nuthin'.  Just
> cheap.

Well, there is no $0.25 one that I know of, but if you are willing to
spend $0.40 for a mask-programmed 4 bit weirdie from the Far East, post
the question again in comp.embedded and it will be answered ;) (I have
nothing to do with this, just saw it before there)

Wonder what your side of the globe looks like. Here (I'm in Israel) you
walk into the market and pick up all sorts of Hong Kong and China-made
electronic gizmos for $<very few>. Since this is a far and remote outlet
and the salesman makes a profit (not to mention the factory + shipping)
I'd expect things like a complete AM/FM radio PLL synthesizer chip plus
LCD driver, plus clock, plus a few buttons to cost in the $0.5 range or
less at the factory gate, wherever that is.

Anyway, as far as I've used PICs so far, I got to do everything with
bit-bashing, from LCDs to UARTs, passing through A/D+D/A and MicroWire,
and even frequency counters, usually without what someone has very
fittingly described as 'the luxury of having interrupts'. So, I don't
really really want anything added, except speed, IO pins as required, and
predictable timing for *everything* *all the time*. In my experience,
bit-bashing libraries that are well debugged and with well known quirks
are MUCH faster to apply than a new hardware feature that may require an,
er, 'silicon errata', such as certain C64 chips I had to do with... So,
imho, for production, a well debugged set of features is worth more than
the technnological bleating edge (within limits of course).

Peter (plp)