[General] What microcontroller to choose for "higher end"

Dear All,

I’ve been playing around with PIC 12F and 16F series microcontrollers now for awhile and learned few things the hard way. Before I started this journey, I had to choose between Atmel and Microchip. I chose Microchip after I found it to be kind of more recommended. Anyways, those things that I’ve learned the hard way are that I started with the low end pic’s. Lack of memory and processing power.

Now for what I need your help is to decide what series I should start exploring or go to perhaps some ARM cortex Mx series (I don’t know is that even an option). My situation is that I don’t need to care if the chip costs 1.70$ or 8$ each as I’m doing this for hobby and I’d rather pay few extra bucks to get real support for floating point numbers and memory so that I don’t need to optimize the last byte. Also I want support from the complier and chip hardware to those floats so that no need to play with integers when float is needed. At least 10bit ADC with several channels, timers, 5V operating voltage, support for I2C and uart are bonus, to name few of what I’d need. C is the language I want to continue using. I also wouldn't want to have more chips eg. external flash or so.

What confuses me is that when I google what people recommend, those threads go like, go to PIC24F, next one says go to dsPIC3x and the other says go directly to arm xxxyyy.. So I’m counting on your experience what you recommend based on what I’ve said? Can you also explain why you recommend that? I hope nobody gets offended by this post.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

If you programmed pics in asm
you learned what does it mean the hard way,
otherwise you just see the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway i am programming pics or atmel's mcu's or arm based mcu's
if you learned c and know the basics of the mcu's
you can easily switch one to another.

We are selecting mcu's according to the project's needs
at least i'm doing like this.

You are saying "i want the most or very powerful mcu"
you can prefer microchips pic32
(also 16 bit dspic have some digital signal capabilities
but pic32 may have the same level with it's 32bit advantage)

You may also prefer arm based mcu's,
these mcu's getting very famous
and a lot of source for learning them,
for example you may choose stm32F4
also has stm32F4 discovery and similar kits
and so many examples and books tutorials about it.

Maybe you can forget mcu programming and
get a raspberry pi kit,
you can work on an operating system
you can not find any mcu as powerful as these systems have.

Thanks for your input. I don't see raspberry as an option for me as I want to make my own PCB's, once I'm happy with the software and testing in breadboard. How do you see PIC24 in handling floating point numbers? I'm thinking that perhaps it could be some sort of compromise as it's available in PDIP and 5V. Only downside is that it needs different compiler but seems to be able to be programmed by pickit2. Is it any more harder to program than say PIC16?

Re: What microcontroller to choose for "higher end"

MPLAB X IDE is ideal for you. It also has a free compiler option so you do not have to buy it.
See link
**broken link removed**

There is only one compiler in the X IDE that is used for all the PICs...

I don't think its harder to program the PIC16, of course once you learn it becomes easy. Maybe you should try the 18F series first then move onto PIC 24. The 18F has USB support features as well, something you may need in your projects. The PIC 24F also has USB host capabilities which is another useful feature to have around.

I also started with 16F, moved on to 18F now I am seriously considering 24F or even the 32F series for my projects.

thanks
a

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MPLAB X IDE is ideal for you. It also has a free compiler option so you do not have to buy it.
See link
http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/devtools/mplabxc/home.html

There is only one compiler in the X IDE that is used for all the PICs...

I don't think its harder to program the PIC16, of course once you learn it becomes easy. Maybe you should try the 18F series first then move onto PIC 24. The 18F has USB support features as well, something you may need in your projects. The PIC 24F also has USB host capabilities which is another useful feature to have around.

I also started with 16F, moved on to 18F now I am seriously considering 24F or even the 32F series for my projects.

thanks
a

Forget about microchip and atmel. Start using the STM8/STM32.
Keil uVision is free till 32k code. ST-Link v2 debugger for all STM microcontrollers cost 7$ on eBay. STM8 starting from 0.20$ per chip.

Alright, I'll give STM32 a try. I was planning to concentrate to one chip model only and get the discovery board for it. https://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/LN1848/PF258515?s_searchtype=keyword
STM32L152C-DISCO
Only thing that bothers me is that it seems that this model chips are quite hard to get. Even digikey and mouser have few. So what might be more widely used model then instead of STM32L152Cx with corresponding discovery board that you'd suggest?

If I get that discovery board do I still need separate ST-Link V2 programmer for extra MCU's?