RE: Spinner Replacement for Omega Race

> I own
> both the Atmel and Xilinx USB in-circuit programmers but I
> haven't tried the Atmel yet since my focus is presently on
> Xilinx. I have no doubt that the Atmel products are
> excellent but my brain can only absorb so much at a time.

FWIW, the Atmel CPLD's were/are nothing special, IMHO. For as many Atmel
CPU's that we use (I have their ARM9 on the Sears Extreme Arcade machine and
an industrial LCD system, and I think every project I have seems to wind up
with at least one AVR ;-) they've never been really competitive on price.
Xilinx and Altera on the other hand are constantly beating each others
brains out for pricing. ;-)

One tip-- the Altera EPM240 can be a really good deal. We used that in a
USB->LCD converter for Chicago Gaming Co. and I think it got down in the ~$3
range in volume. Even singles @ $6 from Digikey is a pretty smok'n deal
compared to most other CPLDs in that density. (Correction-- just looked,
it's up to $6.60 now)

Also, if you ever play with WinAVR, there's a "portable" distribution of it
that you can stick on a thumbdrive and not have to "install" on a machine.
Handy.

I use the CodeVision AVR C compiler and it has some nice features, but it's
licensed/tied to your machine and if/when the installation gets hosed from a
license transfer they can be totally unresponsive to getting you a new
license. >:-( I wouldn't buy it again for that reason alone.

-Clay

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Received on Fri Aug 1 15:43:44 2008