Beginner looking for specific microcontroller.

I'm a complete beginner with microcontrollers and I'm currently working on a hobby project that will require one. Here's the list of what I'll need from it in terms on I/O:

-Light sensor
-A few basic on/off switches
-Output to 2 servos (5v I think) and one motor(12v)
-2 digit counter
-Toggle on/off 8 fans

I've checked the forums and ran across this by millwood:
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"8051 for example is very simple and lots of sources -> low prices. Yet, the project has highly limited onboard peripherals and not that interesting / expandable, especially if you want to commercialize your skills.

PIC is slightly better with its peripherals but the product is on its last leg: we fired a PIC guy earlier this year and he is still without a job. yet we have a hard time getting an ARM guy.

those chips are great if all you do is hobby and you don't intend to commercialize your skills. if you do, you better be lucky.

AVR is a newer platform and much faster than pic. however, it is more hobby than industrial use, due to its young age.

if you are looking to make a living out of your mcu skills, ARM is a great place to invest your time / efforts. it is more complicated than others, but only marginally in my view. the Cortex-M0/M3 chips are very price competitive and offer great performance for your dollar."
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Based off of that I'm leaning towards some sort of AVR. However, I've also seen the name adruino and axon come up a lot. Checking their websites they seem fairly ideal for what I'm looking to do except I don't know if they could do it all at once. Here are the ones I found might suit me:

-AVR STK500
-Axon2
-Arduino

With each one I have doubts though. The avr... it doesn't look anything like the others (female sockets for other chips? is this a troubleshooting device?). Does the Arduino have to be programmed in it's own language (I want to use C or basic) and would it be able to handle everything I need? The Axon2 looks most appealing, but with the highest price tag and all those features it might be overkill.

The bottom line is I'm looking for something that is easy enough to get started with in the world of hobby electronics, but powerful enough to work for my current project. So I'm hoping to get some feedback on these(lots of tutorials available? software I need to compile and code is free? etc.) or recommendations for others.

Thank you.

Hello!

Another option which is not in your list: TI's MSP430 series.
Programmable in C. Free programming environment until 16k exec code provided by TI.
Otherwise, you have the GCC / eclipse option which is totally free and unlimited.

By the way, if you want a really cheap device to start with, TI has an evaluation board
which costs 4.3 USD. The programming hardware interface is on the board, so you don't
need anything else. I's a little bit too small for what you want to do, but for a first
experience it's fine and you have nothing to loose except 4.3 USD.

Dora.

I suggest you ignore millwood's rants - he seems to live in a different world to everyone else. Industry is full of 8051 and PIC microcontrollers.

Keith

@KIK1RIK1
As you said you are a complete beginner please consider minimizing your requirements. I hope If you start off with counter then it will be nice. Just 2 of 7-seg display and a push button key to count number of times the key is pressed.
Then go for some relay interfacing with some sort of condition to on of your fans
Next Servo(5v rc servo) it needs pulse width to be managed.
And continue.

I am pure 8051 person i also want to learn PIC and AVR but not able to find time but for you i suggest start from PIC then switch to AVR/ARM
for beginers PIC is best only 35 instructions to learn and jump to C and microchip give a good IDE and c complier which you can use..
best of luck

You mentioned the arduino platforms, you can use it if you want but my suggestion would be
to avoid the arduino software because it is based on a layer above c, it is actually a wrapper that has its own functions, start up and initialization code etc.
Yes, it it very easy to use for a beginner and it also has many ready library but hiding many details of C and basic c functions means that you loose diversity in your code and
you will have a hard time if you decide to change to a clean c coding platform like avrgcc and it will also be very hard to use tools for pic or other mcu which require native c.
I mainly use avr (using AVRstudio + winAVR) for my projects but this is my hobby, my job in not electronics so i can't suggest a specific family.
I have also started recently to experiment with ARM7 (NXP LPC21XX), very powerful 32bit devices with many advantages (which are not needed in every project)
for a very low price but also have many differences with the avr or pic devices, I'm still doing basic staff with them, trying to learn to use all the peripherals.
I would say that ARM devices are used very frequently in devices that need speed and power, It wouldn't be a bad idea to learn to use them but maybe you should start from a small 8bit mcu..

Alex

Who gave you idea to start with some complicated requirement... its not for new learners,, either you are carried away by some wrong fact that 8051, PIC, AVR and others are too simple.... or you are not clear of anything, but just following somebody's advice blindly.

Very true, the application posted originally can be performed by almost any microcontroller.

Keith

Thanks for all the replies.
@bluehole
That's exactly what I intend to do... I plan on having this done by newyears so I have plenty of time to tinker and toy around with this one step at a time.

I guess I will look more at PIC/AVR controllers as I want to gain experience in C programming (guess the arduino is out). While the MSP430 seems very appealing just get acquainted with microcontrollers I imagine coding for it would be quite different than for PIC/AVR so I'll just start out with those and spend an extra bit of money.

KIK1RIK1 said:

I guess I will look more at PIC/AVR controllers as I want to gain experience in C programming (guess the arduino is out). While the MSP430 seems very appealing just get acquainted with microcontrollers I imagine coding for it would be quite different than for PIC/AVR so I'll just start out with those and spend an extra bit of money.

Click to expand...

It is nice to review the features of different microcontrollers and then choose one according to one's need.
Well MSP430 series is very nice and is 16-bit where as 8051 family and most of the pic are 8-bit.

Another advantage as an experimenter/student you can order a from TI They will ship 2 MSP430 with it for experimenting.

Hello!

PIC / AVR / etc (all the microcontrollers I know) can be programmed in C.
C for MSP430 is not different from C for anything else.
Only a low-level hardware conventions are slightly different.

Dora.

KIK1RIK1 said:

I imagine coding for it would be quite different than for PIC/AVR

Click to expand...

My suggestion is you go for AVR
and BASCOM compiler.
Become expert within a month.
check Home - MCS Electronics for free copiler and free help book.