I have been using the Motorola DSP 5680X series a lot lately. I love them.
Motorola calls them Hybrid DSPs. Basically, they are screamer number crunchers with enough onboard peripherals that the core processor is free to do pretty whatever it wants to. They have onboard stuff to do PWM, Timers, Queued ADC, SPI stuff, CAN, Quadrature Decode, Serial Communications, etc. Very nice for robot controls.
I am using the boards from
New Micros Inc Don't pay any attention to that Forth stuff.* Get CodeWarrior (free license for code up to 16K -- easily done with all the peripherals doing the heavy lifting) from
MetroWerks I can almost guarantee that you'll like it better than MPLAB. I know I do.
Anyway, back to the New Micros boards, I have always been happy with the quality of the stuff I buy from them. For what it's worth...
Joe J.
*Forth is a great language whose time has past. It is a very cool language with power galore but, seriously, the designers of the language bet the farm against RAM becoming essentially free... ...they lost the bet... ...Sorry die hard Forth fans, but I have to call 'em as I see 'em.
Learning Forth is a great way to learn about programming in general, but I can't recommend it for non-educational uses.