Byron A Jeff wrote:
>
> And an addendum. Where can you get Atmel parts. As a hobbiest it's tough
> making relationships with distributors who really only want to talk to you if
> you're planning on buying a half million pieces. So Generally I stick to
> hobbiest friendly places: Digikey, BGMicro, Jameco, Marshall and DallasSemi's
> small order lines. I'll go out on a limb to Future or Arrow if the part
> warrants it.

We can get it from a few suppliers in South Africa. You can try
Arrow or Avnet.

> I've learned from experience that standardizing even at a higher average cost
> saves time and aggravation in the long run. So AMD based PCs are my computing
> hardware platform, Linux is my OS, and PIC's are my microcontroller.
I agree. Check out the migration path between AVR's.

No banking means no migration headaches. Have you had
a look at the Mega AVR? It is an awesome beast with 4X
the memory of the biggest PIC and a series of other bells
& whistles. It is also flash (of course), and cheaper than
the 17$7XX OTP PICs.

Where Mchip is hammering on the internal EEPROM as a sales
pitch (on some PICs), it is standard on the ATMELs. If you
are sick of using precious internal (OTP) ROM for I2C
libraries, you can get by much better with the internal EEPROM
in the AVR's. In fact, the 90LS8535 (equivalent of the 16$877)
has the equivalent of a 24C04 (512 bytes) of EEPROM built-in.

--
Friendly Regards          /"\
                          \ /
Tjaart van der Walt        X  ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN
mailto:tjaart@wasp.co.za  / \ AGAINST HTML MAIL
|--------------------------------------------------|
|  Cellpoint Systems SA    http://www.cellpt.com   |
|--------------------------------------------------|
|     http://www.wasp.co.za/~tjaart/index.html     |
|             WGS84 : -26.0124 +28.1129            |
|             Voice : +27 (0)11 2545100            |
|--------------------------------------------------|