Talk to computers?

[Anthony Fremont]

The micros I looked at seemed to be less handy than that. Can you
recommend a specific part?

The 16F88 is a nice mid-range part. The 18F452 is a nice upper end
part. What language do you wish to develop in? I prefer assembler, and
I highly recommend you learn it first then look at things like JAL or C.
Once you fully understand what these things can do for you, you will
start seeing applications for them everywhere. They are simply tiny
self-contained computers offering high speed and precision and the
ability to easily interface to analog or digital devices. The best part
is that you can reprogram them 100's of thousands of times if necessary.
;-)

Some of the fun things I have built with PIC chips:

1) 4*20 LCD dumb serial terminal. You plug a PC keyboard into it. ;-)
2) stepper motor controllers for a never ending robot project
3) infrared remote controlled temperature display using Dallas 1-wire
sensors (I even do a complete bus search for all devices and address
them all by their full id's)
4) ultrasonic rangefinder
5) telephone line powered caller-id display
6) antique clock beat synchronizer, counter
7) RGB LED rainbow color changer thingy (kinda simple I know, but hey
I'm fascinated by bright, shiny objects)

All of these devices could be easily modified to communicate serially
(or thru USB) to a PC. The PC could be simply used as an output device
or it could exercise full control over the device, the choice is yours
(well actually it's mine ;-) You could do something where the PIC
accumulates data over time and stores it internally (or in another
eeprom for large amounts of data) and then spits it out on command upon
connection to a PC.

 

[Clifford Heath]

January Circuit Cellar magazine had a project based on the work of
Igor Cesko (http://www.cesko.host.sk/) which implements USB 1.1 in
software in a cheap AVR microprocessor, either an ATmega8 or a
AT90S2313.

This would be a good option, as it connects the uC directly to USB
and powers it too, giving you the ability to customise the software
load in the AVR to do specialised (rapid) things, but still get
started with Windows drivers to flip port pins at a lower rate.
The AVR is a pretty easy uC to get started with, and there are
enough different kinds that you can use one of the family for almost
any project. You'd probably not need to learn another architecture
for a number of years.