Just got an e-mail from ST microcontroller ppl
They are now selling thier development kit (with in-circuit debugger) for $7
Just looks like a cool board for trying out any way for $7
A link would help…
It’s just another boring 8-bit MCU.
Leon
ah… well… i was just excited about the $7 price for the development kit. May come in handy for testing stuff and not worrying about breaking any thing
in the mean while any one see this video
Its actualy not boring at ALL that you can buy a $6.50 Board with everything on it to just plug in and start programming, with free c compiler and IDE.
Not everybody has the huge amount of disposable income you seem to have.
i think he found it boring because there just not that much you can do with an 8 bit. especially when you get used to 32bit arm processor. cost might not be an issue here.
It’s just hard to distinguish yourself in the 8bit market now. There’s nothing revolutionary about this product, though the price is nice.
The Cortex-M3’s have phased out a lot of what 8bits used to do for me, except for the most basic tasks. It’s $3 to $4 for a 64k 50mhz 32bit chip in singles for Luminary Micros. Other than that the MSP430 for low power applications.
two things i find revolutionary are the ARM CORTEX 0 chip (data sheets now on NXP webstite)
and the http://www.energymicro.com/ arm cortex 3 cores that are supposed to be the worlds lowest power micros. I dont know how they achieved this but the numbers look great
The 8bit market is pretty swamped. The biggest selling points for me would be price (HCS08 is already sub dollar in low volume) and power consumption. Granted you get a lot less done per clock, but sometimes there isn’t much to do anyway.
If I were making microwaves and washing machines I’d be most interested in price :).
Development tools are what I check first. Maybe it’s considered normal to have an unfamiliar, proprietary, quickly-obsoleted, single-platform development suite for each new microcontroller. But I’m tired of buying new programming hardware for the next best MCU and in less than a year, scouring the Wayback Machine for the dev software. Naturally I’m speaking from the hobbyist/shoestring engineer perspective: money can buy you the limousine service of CCS, IAR, etc. Right now AVR and PIC win. AVR because Atmel came out of the gate freehanded with their dev tools, and PIC because they’ve been around forever and have a lot of community driven tools. Still, being able to take the C shortcut easily makes me favor AVR right now, and if you have to use assembly, the AVR instruction set is still less of a pain to use. HC08 is a great architecture…it’s what AVR would have been if they were stingy and cryptic with dev tools like Freescale is right now. Completely unknown to entry level.
IDK why so many people say there is no C for Pic? I use C30 for my DsPics all the time for free, I write my code with Microchips free MPLAB IDE/free C, then Compile and Program with the click of the mouse, All in one enviroment. If i need to make a change and reprogram the chip i can do it in a matter of 2 seconds
If you look at the ISA for the PICs before the MIPS based parts, you will see a giant WTF in regards to how C is implemented on those processors. You get abstracted away from it with the available commercial compilers, but there is a lot of stuff you can do in a regular machine that you can’t do in a PIC.
This is one reason I like the MSP430s. Completely orthogonal, code can run from RAM, no program space (LPM) hacks needed as in the AVR.
With the increasing popularity of CortexM3 and now M0, which all share a common toolchain and even standardized peripheral interface (CMSIS), I’m surprised people put up with anything else 
Personally, I use the MSP430 which is a great line overall, the AVRs due to certain peripherals, and the AVR32 as its faster at certain operations. Everything else gets relegated to a CortexM3 (STM32 or LPC17xx)
I’ll Stick with my DsPic33’s for the perfect balance
The 16-bit PIC architecture and instruction set are much nicer than the AVR and MSP430, and they offer much more performance, but they use more power.
Leon
yeah with an 8 MHz crystal and PLL @ 16 for 128 MHz it is sucking up over 100mA! but i can get it down, with slower clocks, a few mA is doable