Let's hear what everyone would like to learn more about. Also, please post whatever pic/avr/sx/fpga chips you may have lying around or as part of a dev board.

I've got a PIC18F4550 and some other random PIC that I don't remember (came free with the programmer). The PIC18F4550 I have currently only has USB wired up to it iirc.

I've got a bunch of PICs hanging around (mostly 16F87X series), and a MPLAB ICD I got for free (pity I need to virtualize to use MPLAB 5.7, which is the newest version supporting the original ICD...).

Honestly, I prefer the AVR architecture (feels much cleaner than PIC), but I got all these PICs for free, so I'll stick with them.

I actually voted FPGA, because the ultra-low-level stuff fascinates me.
Heck, I have a research project to do for my final exam in one class this year; I'll be studying CPU design and hopefully designing a simple core of my own.

I've never really delved into PICs or ATTinys or all their ilk. However, I've worked pretty extensively on FPGAs, including http://www.ee.cooper.edu/~stefan/pubs/sasc2008.pdf and http://isis.poly.edu/~vikram/cooper.pdf.

Same here, but I moved away from PICs ~2006, then moved to the SX platform, but then Parallax got rid of my favorite chip (SX52) and is now focusing on it's new Propeller platform (overkill for a microcontroller in my opinion), so now I'm moving over to AVRs.



I know here at NCSU the final design project for ECE 406 Design of Complex Digital Systems has you synthesize an LC-3 core onto an fpga, you can take a look at their website for more info (http://courses.ncsu.edu/ece406/lec/002/) It would be a fairly easy project to do as the LC-3 is essentially a really, really basic RISC processor with 16 instructions.

That looks like a pretty fun course, Ultimate Dev'r. The FPGA course I took at my college was focused more on the signal processing side of FPGAs, using Matlab and SimuLink to graft filters and signal processing applications onto the FPGA, although we did some low-level Verilog and HDL too.

There's a DSP class here at NCSU, but it's a graduate class (as most of the fpga/asic classes are)

Until a *certain someone* creates a *certain subforum*, I'll stick with this topic. It seems to me that people are most interested in PICs (mostly because they got them for free), with AVRs next and then FPGAs. My idea for the subforum (provided we wever get one) would be to first to post a topic with a simple project that everyone can do with either PICs or AVRs. Everyone will then attempt to construct the project, with everyone posting questions/updates as they go along.

As for FPGA, the initial costs are very high (I paid $300 for my Altera DE-2 board for my digital design class), and not too many people requested it, the number of FPGA projects I will post will be limited.

It would be nice if everyone interested in this project post exactly what microcontrollers they have, and how much money they are willing to invest in buying parts, boards, etc.

Here's your subforum and your moderatorship. Go to town with it.

And the blue diamond?

Nope, still no blue diamond for you, sorry.

Am I suppose to know that this is?

Nope.

Back in the day, when Cemetech was a mere infant in the arms of the community, we had an InvisionFree board, and UltDev constantly begged me to give him a blue diamond before his name.

I had a blue diamond before you took it away (I believe it was when you got rid of the RE/BE subforum). Now my username shows up as <<Ultimate Dev'r>> instead of having a blue diamond next to it while Kerm & ti-freak8x get to rock out a red diamond