language?
I was aware that ARM is hot nowadays, but the IDE software are all too expensive for learners. Is MSP430 still a valid chip or is that obsolete already?
The MSP430 is a excelent uC, specialy in low power aplications. Off course ARM is much more powerfull, but in small and medium projects, the MSP430 can be used without problems. All the documentation is on the ti website, http://www.ti.com.
Américo Dias
Product cycles in the embedded world are different from in the PC world … in some ways the PIC was obsolete when it was introduced a decade ago, but it’s still a good chip. The trick is to match the chip to your application, while still not spending all your days learning new architectures.
I think of these uCs in a spectrum from small to large…
The PICs are tiny and cheap, but because of their tininess they’re a pain to program. The AVRs are a lot nicer to program, and they are available in almost as wide a range of sizes/specializations as PICs. 8051-derivatives are the trilobites of the microcontroller world: amazingly successful, a million varieties, available for every possible niche, but also kind of crufty.
If you need more CPU power than what those can give you, then you can move on up to an MSP430 (not available in packages as small as a PIC or AVR, but still pretty small and cheap), or an ARM processor, or an embedded PowerPC, or a PC/104 or Mini-ATX board with a multi-GHz desktop processor on it.