The most talked about microcontrollers tend to be the latest 32-bit ARM full-featured products. While these are the most attractive and exciting, the biggest market still is 8-bit microcontrollers at a 3-to-1 ratio. What this means is the applications for 8-bit MCUs are much more plentiful and (to most people’s surprise) utilized in more end products. The 8-bit MCUs tend to have less overhead in programming and don’t require a full-fledged operating system to function.
To support developers of 8-bit applications, Microchip has produced the Curiosity HPC (High Pin Count) development board. This board allows for the programming and development of traditional 8-bit PIC MCUs from Microchip. The board supports 40-pin as well as 28-pin MCUs in a DIP package. It essentially breaks out all of the pins on the MCU, allowing you to easily interface without having to layout a breadboard with external components. There is a USB interface on the board for programming with MPLAB (Microchip’s IDE). On top of that, the Curiosity HPC board has connections for two MikroElektronika Click boards which, if you remember from a previous episode of New Product Discoveries, streamline development for IoT, sensing, and many other applications. Scott from our Engineering team at Digi-Key has a blog post entitled “Microchip Curiosity HPC Development Board” devoted to the board if you are looking for more information.
The other product I want to introduce to you is the ADALM-PLUTO Active Learning Module from Analog Devices. The ADALM-PLUTO is a transceiver with an extraordinarily wide bandwidth of 325 MHz to 3.8 GHz. This platform uses an FPGA with 28K logic cells and an ARM Cortex-A9 processor capable of running Linux. The ADALM-PLUTO is a great tool for introducing electronic engineering students and enthusiasts to Software-Defined Radio (SDR), Radio Frequency (RF), and Wireless Communication fundamentals. Again, Scott goes in to further detail in his blog post, “Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO”.
