I am a beginner in electronics, till now i understand basics of electronics and worked upon 8085 & arduino only, now i want to enhance my practical skills by working upon some more microprocessor/microcontroller. Please suggest me the most helpful for the same and which one i must brought as there are a lot of options available in market.
Also if any kit or book is available for this purpose, suggest me that as well, i really want to try my hands on practical electronics now.
Thanks
I would recommend the Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers as a good starting point. The micros themselves are a little bit pricey piece for piece for an 8-bit part, but for a hobbyist they're great, because the programmers are cheap, and the software tools are free (and excellent) These are the micros on which the Arduinos are based, and there are tons of examples for all variety of applications using the entire range of micros. http://www.avrfreaks.net/ is an excellent resource if you're just starting out, and the people in the forum are extremely helpful.
Well, if you are new to the MCU world maybe you should focus on having a strong knowledges of the basis. If you jump dirctly to the trendy world of ARM such as Cortex m3 as soon as things do not work you will get lost due to the hyper complexity of thoses beasts. It's not the right time for you to solve problems such as PLL locking, clocks gating, mutichannel DMA or very compex Timer units. you should focus on basic but powerful 8 or 16bit MCU. such as MSP430, Pics, AtMega, etc. If you know how to work at this level, without hal libraries, rom included RTOS etc. You will become a much better embedded programmer. I have tons of example of programmers who began with powerful ARM chip and that put float variable everywhere, use complex c++ class and finally end up with exteremely innefficient and very slow result. If you know about fixed point math, look up tables and efficient usage of embedded ressources you will be a king. there is also a debate about the language to learn with. 10 years ago people would say that you have to start with assembly first. and afterwards you may use higher level languages such as C. but real ingeneers will stay at the assembly level. I think that it's to true anymore. having knowledge in assembly is good but nowadays c compiler offers very decent performance. What is important is to know what happend at the lowest level. what is a register overflow. how integer math works and how to use bitwise operations.
The O'Reilly book "Designing Embedded Hardware" by Catsoulis has a pretty good review of the different families, their architectures, and the areas where they excel and why somebody might choose or not choose a family. Many people (myself included) have their favorite dev environments and I know I'm inclined to recommend my own favorite, but I think the best way to go about it is to read some good overviews and try to match the family to the jobs you can picture yourself doing.
I don't think you'll find much strong opposition to recommendations to start w/ an 8 or 16 bit platform, though. That seems to be pretty good advice.
