Under some cases the 54 is good for this. I have done projects where the students build a take home project and a source of cheap chips is great. Simple concepts like program flow, bit operations etc are still easy on this level of chip. For a general purpose do it all and keep reusing they may not be good choices but I still have a lot of products out there using the 16C54. Sometimes the elegance of coding is easier to teach with less resources. It all depends on what you are trying to do. I have taugh assy lang programming to 6th grade students in an after school club and it means a lot to that age groupp to have something to take home that they did. At that age they are kind of like us engineers ... loving our toys;)

Larry


---- Chetan Bhargava <cbhargava@gmail.com> wrote: 
> > So: indeed, better start with a 14-bit core (or maybe higher, depends on
> > your objectives).
> 
> Absolutely agreed, it completely depends on objective. I was looking
> at the LPC Demo Board lessons the other day and they were as simple as
> blinking LED, running them into a pattern, de-bouncing switch, etc.
> 
> For simple lessons like these (of course not counting the ADC lessons)
> I would say it is an OK device :-)
> 
> --
> Chetan Bhargava
> Web: http://www.bhargavaz.net
> Blog: http://microz.blogspot.com
> 
> -- 
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist