On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 7:27 PM, Mike Harrison <mike@whitewing.co.uk> wrote:

>>In terms of performance/$ PICs haven't made much sense for quite a long
>>time IMO. =A0What they do offer that very few other vendors do is parts in
>>hobby friendly packages and very low pin count parts.
>
> I'd generally agree with this & haven't looked at PICs for anything but
> 8-pin jobs for a while,

We are indeed using an 8-pin PIC along with the Cortex M3 part in the
same board. ;-)

> although I did recently find a 'bargain' for a particular combination of
> peripherals in the PIC24FJ64GB004 with USB host for GBP2.50.
> AFAIK there aren't any lowish pincount ARMs at a similarly
> low-cost with USB host and well-documented free USB source-code.

I am not so sure if Microchip USB stack is so well documented or not.
But indeed, other vendors' USB stack are also not that well documented.
I have not really spent much time on the USB host stack so I am not
that familiar with low cost MCUs with USB host functions.

Compared to STM32F105, it seems to be cheaper. But the ST parts
are more powerful.

At what kind of qty you get the chip?
http://mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=3DPIC24FJ64GB004&Ns=3DPricing|=
0&FS=3DTrue
http://mouser.com/_/?Keyword=3Dstm32f105&Ns=3DPricing|0&FS=3DTrue

> Personally I'd like an ARM with a low pin count, tons of RAM (64K+) but
> small flash (32 K is fine) to keep costs down, or flashless with a bootlo=
ader
> to boot to RAM from SPI flash. Seems that big RAM always comes with big,
> expensive flash as well....

It seems big Flash is easier to do than big SRAM. Now that Microchip
wants to buy SST, they will make progress in bigger Flash as well.



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Xiaofan http://mcuee.blogspot.com

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