Comments on: Parts: 32KB SPI SRAM memory (23K256)

By: mendicantmonkey

mendicantmonkey — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:14:40 +0000

@samurai1200:

Maybe the photographer didn’t have the dip-8 on-hand when building the circuit.

By: samurai1200

samurai1200 — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:37:43 +0000

if there’s an dip-8 of this chip, whats the point of the breakout board in the picture? lolz.

By: DB

DB — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:18:20 +0000

SD/MMC have SPI interfaces in addition to the MMC interface. During initialization the SPI mode is activated by a logic level on one of the pins. There’s also a chip-select when in SPI-mode, so you can have more than one MMC.Some knock-off MMC chips may not have SPI, buyer beware.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:03:47 +0000

@stu:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller

A PIC, is that like a commodore or something? They got multicore, 64k, 32-bit, mcus now. Get with the times. ;)

By: Ian Lesnet

Ian Lesnet — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:29:28 +0000

@matthias – You’re right, my mistake. Corrected.

By: matthias

matthias — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:26:35 +0000

how do you address 32 KB with 13 lines? I think you need 15 (=log2(32768)). Also, you often use an 8-bit latch as the address is piped out in 2 steps like on the ATmega128.

By: Ian Lesnet

Ian Lesnet — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:21:18 +0000

32K is a lot of space compared to most microcontrollers. I’d use this chip to built a big look-up table, buffer data from an ethernet interface, buffer high-speed data acquisition, etc.

For MP3 decoding, check out the VS1001K or STA013/STA015.

By: therian

therian — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:12:49 +0000

Ok this was last drop, I was tempting to try atmel products but all hardware and software which I bought for PICs over couple years stopped me.
So what do I need to start in AVR ? AVRISP MKII as programmer will be enough ? (why not free serial? because laptops dont have one)
Which c compiler have most # of libraries that make life easier ?
What DIP chip should be easy to learn but still powerful enough. maybe Atmega8 ?

sorry to post it here

By: therian

therian — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:28:20 +0000

which chip are you talking about?, there is low power low feature family and there is high performance family. Same apply to atmel chips. Comparing features it easy to find almost same chips for all of them

By: Stu

Stu — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:02:26 +0000

Interesting. Has anybody done a comparison of speed differences between this chip and, say a good quality SPI based EEPROM chip?
I dont know whether there will be much difference in performance given the SPI interface is the limiting factor.
Plus why is it Microchip only deal in low capacities and low CPU speeds and power? I mean a ‘brand new’ 32Kb chip in this day and age!?
Is that why everybody uses Arduino and Atmel AVRs over PICs?
Dont get me wrong, the primary microcontroller I use is the PIC!

By: pokey

pokey — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:51:13 +0000

@Andre: Last I’d played with it, you would need a minimum 20MHz ARM7TDMI with ~32k of RAM for buffers to decode MP3 in realtime. Somehow I don’t think any 8 bit PIC will be up to it.

By: andre

andre — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:25:19 +0000

Might make building a PIC+microSD based mini MP3 player that much easier. Use the chip as the page buffer.

Don’t know if an 8 pin PIC would have enough grunt to decode MP3s but it ought to be capable of playing short WAV files.

Will keep you posted

-A

By: x

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:38:47 +0000

if it were than there would less than 32k people asking that question

By: stunmonkey

stunmonkey — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:46:02 +0000

32k? That’s totally not enough to run Crysis…