Suggest a low cost microcontroller development board.

[itp]

Hi All,

Kindly suggest a low cost microcontroller development board for remote controlling of a power supply.
The development board should have:
1.  Ethernet and USB connectivity for remote control
2.  4 Channels of Analog Input with 12bit resolution
3.  2 Channels of Analog Output with 12bit resolution
4.  10 Digital I/O's
5.  PIC or 8051 based boards are preferable.


Thanks and Regards
Itp

[TucoRamirez]

check for any pinguino board for pic, maybe this will be interesting for your budget (in olimex page)

[Mentor]

There aren't many PICs with 12 bits ADCs and 12+ bit DACs, this may be a problem. Do you mind to use a dsPIC or a PIC24?

What about using some Arm Cortex-M board?

[edeca]

Do you definitely need that much resolution in your analogue input and output?  You will almost certainly need an external DAC to get this close with a small microcontroller.

How about something like the Analog ADuC range (datasheet)?  These are designed as precision ADC and DAC devices with a uC core.

What power supply are you trying to remote control?

[h0nk]

Hello Itp,

the Silabs C8051F020 has a 12 bit ADC with 8 inputs and 2 12 bit DAC's
and lots of 5 V-tolerant IO's.
JTAG for debugging is also available.
XRAM for data can be extern extended up to 64 kbyte.

It is based on the (One-Cycle-)8051 core and can run at 25 MHz.

But no USB and no Ethernet.

Evalboards and JTAG-Adapters are available at ebay.


Best Regards

[itp]

Hi,
Any ADuC or dsPIC development board with Ethernet port and TCP/IP stack available.

What is your opinion of using the low cost single board computers Raspberry PI and BeagleBone Black in such application?  I don't have any experience on Linux environment.
Thanks and regards
Itp

[mike_au]

As far as I can see the only requirements that the RPi meets are ethernet and probably the the 2 output channels.

The USB interface is capable of device mode operation but sits behind a hub so it isn't easily accessible.
It doesn't have any analogue inputs.
It only has 8 digital IO pins.

Add to that a lack of Linux experience and it doesn't seem like a terrific fit your your requirements.

I'm not as familiar with the Beaglebone so maybe that has a few more peripherals and would be a better option but personally I would tend towards a larger uC.

[Ichan]

No PIC with 12 bit ADC & DAC, but recently microchip announce their new PIC24 GC series which is very interesting - 16 bit sigma delta ADC + 12 bit 10 MSPS Pipeline ADC + 10 bit 1 MSPS DAC + USB Device/Host/OTG.

Have a look, i ordered some recently including the Dev. Kit (not fit with the requirement as it has no ethernet).

-ichan

[centiane]

Hi Itp, Silabs C8051F340 is same of C8051F020 and add USB module, the development kit round as 35$.
This is a very good choose.

Regards Centiane.

[h0nk]

Hi,

in the last few days i got my hands on the STM32F107VC.
This beast has it all.

- 12 bit A/D
- 12 bit D/A
- USB Client/Host/OTG
- Ethernet MAC (but without PHY)
- SPI/I2C/CAN/UART/USART/TIMER
- GPIO's

With the 'de'-evaled Version of the CMX MicroNet Library i was able to get up a
small NTP Server in some hours.

Buts its a beast. It will bite You :-)


Best Regards

[Stokni]

have you looked at the mikroe site? they have boards for PIC and 8051, can be extended with small cards to use any functionality.

i use the easypic 6 and 7 and am very happy with it.

[PaulC]

MikroElektronika Boards http://www.mikroe.com/
have had the rounds from me to i use :
easy avr5 ,easy avr5a , bigavr, easy pic, with my son as learning tools.
they are reliable and have had some stick..also the small board add-ons are useful to.
i have had boards & add-ons from  http://www.futurlec.com/index.shtml
these are better priced and also reliable..

[Cain]

With the 'de'-evaled Version of the CMX MicroNet Library i was able to get up a
small NTP Server in some hours.

I'm looking for a TCP/IP stack for 8051 so I wonder if the one you used are specific for STM32? If not is this 'de'-evaled version available somewhere?