Help me pick a microcontroller!

Hey,

I am new to this forum, a long time software developer, but fairly new to hardware.

I am looking to build something that is USB controlled to interface with software. I cant give the specific details of what it does, but I can give enough details to get help.

The missing piece to my puzzle is which chip I should use to control it all. I need something small that will fit cleanly in with a device about the size of a USB storage drive.
I am hoping it is easy to interface with via usb, and has an additional 3 outputs and 1 input (or more)


Can anybody point me into the right direction of which chip I should use? I am looking for something fairly cheap, small, but easy to work with.

I can offer a reward for the person who points me in the best direction of what I should use; If i end up using this chip.

If there is any other details needed, please let me know.

Thanks!

You have to provide more details such as, number of ADCs required, interfaces like I2C, UART, SPI, number of IO required, amount of flash and ram.

These all counts while selecting a micro

There are so many micro controllers with on chip USB transceiver.In my opinion PIC18f4550/2550 is an easy to use micro controller which you get in DIP and SMD packages.Just Google it.

nandhu015 said:

You have to provide more details such as, number of ADCs required, interfaces like I2C, UART, SPI, number of IO required, amount of flash and ram.

These all counts while selecting a micro

Click to expand...

I am not too sure which interface I would like to go with. I am looking for the simplest one to interface with via usb that is easily accessable on mac, windows and linux. I need atleast 3 additional outputs and one input. As for the flash/ram, not much is needed. As the program that will be put on it will just be to interface with my desktop software. So all the actual work will be done on the host machine.

S.P.S said:

There are so many micro controllers with on chip USB transceiver.In my opinion PIC18f4550/2550 is an easy to use micro controller which you get in DIP and SMD packages.Just Google it.

Click to expand...

I checked that out, it looks pretty big; but the SMD version is alot smaller. Are they pretty much the same between the two, where a program written for the DIP version would work directly on the SMD version?


Thanks!


Edit: I am also looking for the cheapest chips possible.

of course. Difference is only in the package.the chip cost is around Rs 350 in india

pic18f4550 is the best chip to communicate usb to pc. microchip provide so many library to interface windows form based application communication like CDC , HID and mass storage device .

The issue is, the price is about $5-7 for each chip. This is too expensive for what I'd like to do.


Looking around, I have found the ATTiny45/85 (**broken link removed**).

I see tutorials of using this with usb, such as here: https://codeandlife.com/2012/02/22/v-usb-with-attiny45-attiny85-without-a-crystal/
And in an actual product: https://www.blinkstick.com/
Using the V-USB Library.

Now, I am not sure if this has an input aswell that I can use, to interface with my software?

Thanks!

Sorry for all the questions, still learning this