Hi all.. So in surveying the available microcontrollers and RTC timers I need to have at my disposal, I decided to move away from the MSP430 + external RTC (DS1337) in favor of the PICF24 series that has the built-in RTCC.. That allows me to keep down the cost and alleviate an external part and it's interfacing.. As someone that has never programmed a PIC but has programmed various other embedded platforms (Arduino, PPC,etc), I wanted to get your input on whether the processor I plan to choose has enough memory to do what I want.. The specific part I'm looking at is the PIC24F16KA102 which has 16k program memory + 1.5Kb SRAM + 512b EEPROM and has two I/O ports (16-bit Port A, 8-bit Port B) which I gather can be used to drive displays,etc
In my project, I'll have an LCD display of some sort that will hopefully be connected via SPI and a few buttons. The controller will allow the user to set the current time and set some wake-up points to do some "work" which in this case is to trigger a relay for running a small motor for <30 seconds at which time it goes to sleep. My initial hunch is that the generated code for this sort of small application ought to easily fit in the 16Kb program space but I thought I'd ask you all first as you've likely got more experience with these PIC processors than I do.
This is one area that I had issues with on the Arduino -- it was fairly easy to run out of space -- particularly for a data logger that wrote (and had code for a FAT32 library) to an SD card... In this case, no logging needed so hopefully the needed space in the program area will be low.. ?
In my project, I'll have an LCD display of some sort that will hopefully be connected via SPI and a few buttons. The controller will allow the user to set the current time and set some wake-up points to do some "work" which in this case is to trigger a relay for running a small motor for <30 seconds at which time it goes to sleep. My initial hunch is that the generated code for this sort of small application ought to easily fit in the 16Kb program space but I thought I'd ask you all first as you've likely got more experience with these PIC processors than I do.
This is one area that I had issues with on the Arduino -- it was fairly easy to run out of space -- particularly for a data logger that wrote (and had code for a FAT32 library) to an SD card... In this case, no logging needed so hopefully the needed space in the program area will be low.. ?