On Thursday, Dec 18, 2003, at 12:06 US/Pacific, Andre Abelian wrote:

> Should I start looking at Ti, or cypress micro or Atmel.

Yes.  No one should restrict their "knowledge base" to a single
architecture.  It's very career-limitting.  TI and Atmel both
have assorted free or low cost seminars, as well as significant
hobbyist followings, and active mailinglists.  I know less about
cypress. I have a whole bunch of "cheap evaluation boards" from
vendors that I purchased pretty much just to learn about them.


> My question is how would you manage all this when it comes
> To look for new job? Most companies are saying yaa you
> Have good experience on pic but sorry we do not use pic.

1) you can explain that microcontroller issues are similar,
    even across vastly different architectures.  When you learn
    to implement a bit-banged i2c interface on a pic, you are
    learning a lot more about i2c and how it works than you
    are about the PIC architecture specificly.  Especially
    if you've been programming in C.

2) Compared to most other controller architectures, PICs
    are rather mysterious.  I wouldn't think that anyone
    who can bend a PIC to their will would have any trouble
    programming an AVR, 8051, 68xx, or MSP430.  (OTOH, if
    you've never programmed anything but a PIC, that 2nd
    architecture is probably the toughest.  (ANY 2nd one,
    given ANY first one.))  Some thing you'll find annoying,
    some blessedly easy, but they're not all THAT different.

3) Take TI's free online training.  Buy one of their cheap
    emulation tools.  take a look at the yahoo msp430 group.

    See also http://www.geocities.com/westfw/trip-report-msp430.txt

BillW

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