Embedded programming - how to choose a target processor

Purpose of this blog is not a step by step tutorial, therefore I won't make a tutorial about uC's programming (besides I'm a beginner as well). If you want to program uC's I'll give you some advices:
- First of all, don't ask me or communities questions like: "What's a debugger". Most questions are answered thousands times, you just need to do the search, if you ask, you'll just be another lazy, annoying newbie.
OK. Real advices:
- Learn C programming language, its simple and efficient. "ANSI C" by Brain Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie is a good point to start. Go through this book before buying a MCU dev kit.
- Find out which uC suits you best:

• Atmel's AVR is very popular, there is a lot of support, there is a free IDE (from Atmel?): Avr Studio (C, ASM, C++), programmer devices are simple and cheap, there are tons of sample projects, schematics, examples on the internet. A great advantage is BASIC compiler for most AVRs (called Bascom). BASIC is a great programmer's time saver in some applications, but in some cases produces slow and large output. Bascom isn't free, but there is some kind of evaluation. Avr is an 8bit uC. And it's good for beginners. Cont's of AVR:

1. Atmel for unknown reasons, discontinued for a couple of month's production of world's most popular hobby MCU's. That increased AVR's prices incredibly. Atmel is an unreliable manufacturer.
2. Programming devices are cheap and simple, but programming-debugging devices are quite complicated and aren't that cheap. You will need a debugger sooner or later.
3. To be honest AVRs are becoming out of date.

• On the other hand very popular are MCUs based on ARM core. These units are 32bits, have tons of peripherals and are a nightmare for beginners. Most manufacturers don't provide a free IDE, some have very poor support. If you choose an ARM based MCU, you should have some knowledge about uC's. Debuggers are very expensive and in fact essential. If you already know something about programming, choose it. (Later you'll have to choose between the manufacturer and between core version).
• My advice for beginners is to choose Texas Instruments MSP430 16bit uC's. It's cheap - search for TI Launchpad dev board, this board has an integrated programmer-debugger. TI provides an Eclipse based IDE that is limited to 16k output code, but 16k is quite a lot of code. Bet you won't be able to fill a 2k space for a long time ;) MSP430 has a big community, a marvelous and clear support, you don't need anything else. TI is an excellent choice for a beginner.
• There are many other kinds of MCU's. Microchip PIC and Motorola are very popular, but I have no experience about it. Worth mentioning is that there are thousands kinds of PIC's and that Megasquirt is based on Motorola MCU.
• Summary: ARM based uCs seem to be the future in very advanced systems. TI offers a variety of MSP430 uCs from simple units to quite powerful ones.

- Get familiar with Assembler. It's useful. I don't mean, try to write complicated algorithms in ASM, just get familiar with it's commands and syntax. It will help you figure out how MCU works.

My gear:

• TI Launchpad MSP430 + CCS
• ARM Cortex M3 STM32 (STM32F103RBT) Attached to a simple dev board with fancy TFT Touch Screen (which I haven't used once ;). I must warn you, that ST provides awful and poor support. Perhaps NXP or TI would be a better choice - I'll consider this if I need a change.
• A simple DIY contact board with couple of switches, a 2x16 HD47780 Lcd and transistors attachable for both TI and STM32 devboards.
• ARM programmer-debugger: A copy of Amontec JTAG-Key.
• IDE: Eclipse + Codesourcery Toolchain + OpenOCD. Very useful and totally free with no limitations.

I think that's all for today.

Cheers.


Update:

Recently I got a new devboard from ST STM32F4 and a copy of TI's BeagleBoard - DevKit8000 equipped with a Cortex A8 processor. It's a powerful processor with a huge core designed to run under control of an OS rather than bare metal like other MCUs I mentioned in this post. I am trying to make use of it.