What microchip do we need?

Dear reader


We were asked to make an 'educated guess' in how fast our microchip needed to be.


In a project last year we used the atmega 328chip. We think that this chip is suitable for our PID line follower. The chip we used then was mounted on a arduino board. The good thing about this is that we can test our software more easily thanks to the arduino's at our disposal. When we have a finished and working program we should be able to upload it into our SMD atmega328 chip.

We need a microchip that is powerful enough to handle all the calculations. The 20Mhz clock speed of the atmega328 should do the job.

As for the I/O, the atmega has a maximum of 23I/O pins. This is more than enough for our project.

We don't know yet how big the program will be but we figure the the available 32kbytes EEPROM memory will be more than enough.

Thanks to the fact that the bootloader of arduino is easy to find we can use the arduino software to program our line follower. It should be easy programmable with this program software. This high(er) program language is easier to use than a low program language and allows us to write more difficult programs.
(The bootloader can be found at http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Bootloader)

As for the price, the atmega328-AU cost us 4.19 Euro (about 5.5USD).

Your Blogmeister
Giete