I am a guitar player who has recently started doing DIY stuff and now that I've built a few basic effect pedals, I want to do something bigger.
My new project is going to be a tremolo pedal which is basically an effect that makes the volume go up and down in time with an LFO. I've seen a few 555 oscillators for this purpose but they don't look that attractive to me (sine wave requires a million parts for example) so when I got introduced to the world of microcontrollers, they really caught my interest.
However, I know nothing about the different families. I can't tell you what makes AVRs different from PICs or what advantage PSoCs has over ARMs. I had a quick look at sparkfun electronics and the specs don't tell me anything.
So I hope that you guys can help.
I want the following:
*edit*
I also forgot to say that interrupts would be really useful since that would save some CPU cycles which would be a good way to give the LFO higher resolution.
My new project is going to be a tremolo pedal which is basically an effect that makes the volume go up and down in time with an LFO. I've seen a few 555 oscillators for this purpose but they don't look that attractive to me (sine wave requires a million parts for example) so when I got introduced to the world of microcontrollers, they really caught my interest.
However, I know nothing about the different families. I can't tell you what makes AVRs different from PICs or what advantage PSoCs has over ARMs. I had a quick look at sparkfun electronics and the specs don't tell me anything.
So I hope that you guys can help.
I want the following:
- Something that can be programmed in C
- Something with free software tools and cheap hardware tools available. I'm a hobbyist so I don't want to spend more than $50 on a programmer.
- 3 or 4 analog inputs for potentiometers
- 2 or 3 analog outputs for the LFO as well as output of the LFO to a two-color LED (as high resolution as possible)
- 3 binary inputs for buttons
- 3 binary outputs for an RGB LED and 1 for a relay (maybe I have to run the relay with a transistor?)
- 2 analog outputs
- Something to keep track of the time (as accurately as possible)
- I don't know what speed I need but something that can run at maybe at least 10mhz with an external crystal would be great
- Some sort of flash memory or similar that I can use to save and load user data
*edit*
I also forgot to say that interrupts would be really useful since that would save some CPU cycles which would be a good way to give the LFO higher resolution.