MCU suggestion

[BensMicro]

Good afternoon.

I need one suggestion about my PCB design.
I need to work with microphone and buzzer, and beside this i need to make the RTC. What kind of MCU would you suggest ?

Im looking for some cheap and trusted/tested MCU.

Ben

[PCM programmer]

16F628 or 16F88.

[octal]

for the same price you can have the 18F1320 with more memory and more devices and more speed
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[ckielstra]

[BensMicro]

The app is used for detecting when the user has start to talk and when he has ended the conversation and the timer is counting conversation time....

[ckielstra]

How are you going to detect if 'speech' is present? I recommend you to do this with an analog electronic filter as this is the easiest solution. The alternative would be to digitize the signal from the microphone and do some frequency analysis in software, but this requires a much more powerful processor.

Assuming you do the speech detection by an analog circuit than the required processor could be any simple 8 bit processor with about 4kb program memory. Popular processor families are the 8051, Microchip PIC and Atmel AVR.

The 8051 is a good processor but not very popular anymore in new designs. I don't know why.
The PIC and AVR processors are very similar in capabilities and price setting. In my opinion the AVR is slightly easier to learn and gives a fractional higher performance at the same clockrate. The differences are small but once you decide for a processor platform it will be difficult to switch as the price of development platform is expensive and learning curve is high.

For the Atmel AVR processors there is the free open source GCC compiler available. Microchip provides a free compiler version for the PIC (it's called Student version but is full featured except for code optimization).

If you decide on the PIC processor then I suggest to go for the PIC18 series as these chips are more powerfull at almost equal prices to the PIC16. Note that the PIC16 and PIC18 require different compilers and you don't want to buy a new compiler for your next project.

[Guest]