Does anyone know which PIC chip this uses? One controller I am looking seriously at is the OOBOT40-3 Robot Control Computer which comes with an ooPic 40 pin chip that I am not really interested in. However, there are two chips I could potentially want to put on it - the Basic Atom 40 pin or the Muvism 40 pin Java chip that is based on the PIC 18x452.
The BasicAtom 40 uses the PIC16F877(a) chip running at 20mhz.
Wonderful! It would be compatible with the controller board I am looking at then, since the ooPic 40 is the same type of chip.
Thanks.
Will there be a Basic Atom Pro/40? If so, what chip will it be based on?
8-Dale
Isn’t the 16F series bad because its lack of multiplication? (According to nick)
The AtomPro40 module will be using the H8-3687 running at 20mhz.
Compared to similar modules the BasicAtom is one of the fastest. Yes, not having a hardware multiply slows the Atoms math compared to processors that have multipliers. The AtomPro has both hardware multiply and divide which is one of the reasons it is so much faster than the Atom. That doesn’t mean the Atom is slow. For what it’s designed for it does verywell.
16F is “bad” for people starting off who want to use a free C compiler.
The lack of hardware-helped multiplication (which can be done entirely in assembly software) means that 16F’s don’t get a free C compiler.
There’s nothing wrong with using one, though.
Assembly is definitely the best (if a bit tedious) way of learning what the micro is actually doing.
And, if you’re going to wrap all of that up into a nice package with an onboard BASIC interpreter and start cranking it out by the millions, then there’s no reason not to save bucks for the extra software hassle.
The creators of the Atom were probably restricted to assembly, anyway, since creating it in C, translating that into assembly, and then having the chip translate BASIC into machine code based on that…
Well, that would probably be very messy.
The only difference between 16 and 18, regarding the multiplication, is that the 18’s have extra registers (memory storage) linked directly to the Arithmetic Logic Unit (the piece of hardware that does all the math) to hold the extra-large answers.
At the processor level, the task is almost exactly the same, since they both do multiplication by doing many additions.
Funny, though that it should be an 16F877A.
We use a 16F877 (no A) in my Microcomputers class.