   Microcontroller hell
  Well, two days ago I was elated to find microchip.com and the CHEAP microcontrollers they offer.  For $5-$10 US I can get everything I need.  Today I foudn the catch.  To program them, even in ASM, I need to spend a shitload of money on a programmer.  To program in C, the compiler by itself is $125.  Does anyone know where I can get any of this junk cheaper?! It just doesn''t seem logical to me to pay 25 times the price of a chip for stuff to program it. 
  But you can program thousands of chips with that stuff!  It''s relatively cheap thus ;  And why would I be programming thousands of chips exactly? I''m a hobbyist, not some crazy small business owner. ;  Figure out how to program them by yourself.  It''s like two hobbies in one! ;  just do a google search there are much cheaper programmers, also designs for some if you want to build one yourself. I bought a kit that i had to solder the parts onto the board myself, and it was about £25 (about US$18). Not sure about C compilers though, there might be something on this site... http://www.gnupic.org/ ;  If the architecture you''re writing for is relatively common, you should be able to find a GCC that will compile for it, I would think...don''t know about actually transferring the program to memory, if you need something special to do that. ;  Depending on the chosen platform, you might be able to use GCC as a cross-compiler. I've never done it myself, so I have no idea of how well it works...[Edit: ]Dang, Promit beat me to it... . As for transferring the program to the microcontroller, that depends on your chosen memory... EPROM might be the most conventional... then you need an EPROM burner... You might be able to borrow one somewhere... Or build one yourself, for ~$10. I have an old 32MB compact flash card that I've been thinking about using as storage in some kind of project... To see how well it works.../Ksero   [edited by - Ksero on February 14, 2004 8:28:05 PM];  Do it the man''s way: compile the program into opcodes by hand, and then use a switch bank to write it into memory. And then hope you don''t get any power cuts, ever. ;  Gah, well I''ll just keep to programming my engine, and when I have money to waste, I''ll get back to this... ;quote:Original post by superpig  Do it the man''s way: compile the program into opcodes by hand, and then use a switch bank to write it into memory. And then hope you don''t get any power cuts, ever.  Seymour Cray did that. Toggled an entire operating system into a computer, in octal. It worked the first time. He died later that evening. 