Controller chips

One of the things I am doing with this blog is simply a place to jot down my own notes. I'm not necessarily meaning for this blog to be one that others get much out of other than curiosity.

Some preliminary checking on chips and I'm favoring the PIC16F616 chip. It has several useful things including 12 data lines (this would allow me to drive the servo mandibles of the mouth with one chip possibly two, a massive 128 bytes of ram (yes, a whole 128 bytes of ram, barely enough to store your mailing address) and built in timers. For what I am doing that is ideal. Also as the program storage is 2K of memory, I can do my code in C as opposed to Assembler.

I had originally looked at cheaper chips but I would need a large number of the cheaper chips to do the job of one or two of these and these chips only cost a dollar or two. For the entire project, I should not need more than a few chips.

I am going to Washington DC this week. Going to see if they have any stores that cater to hobbyist electronics. I would like to talk to someone that has done this before.