[Coco] Re: Disk controller summary?

[James Dessart]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:

> Do any of these PICs, AVRs, or HC11s clock fast enough to sample the
> flux transitions?  ISTR they were in the 100s of KHz range, so
> probably can.

Some have built-in oscillators that can go up to 8 MHz, and there are
definitely ones that go higher with an external, crystal oscillator. All
the ATmega series has A/D inputs, but I'm not sure how fast they are. They
have varying amounts of built-in memory, depending on the model, but the
ones I have have 1K RAM built-in. It's one of the more modest ATmegas.

> BTW, never heard of the AVR before, but it sounds like a cool family of  
> devices, maybe good for building MIDI routers?  --Mike K.

It's entirely possible. They have serial IO, sometimes multiple ports of
it, A/D inputs, multiple timer clock sources, etc. The manufacturer is
Atmel (http://www.atmel.com/) and the equipment to get started is pretty
cheap, if you go for the in-system programmer.

James