Question

For those who deal with microcontroller programming…

I want to take a momentary contact switch (let’s say a Staples Easy Button, since that’s the most fun momentary contact switch around), and when it is pressed, send a broadcast UDP packet across a network (to be received by a .NET application and do all sorts of fun things from there).

The closest thing I’ve found so far is industrial data acquisition hardware interfaces, but I’m looking for more of a programmable single microcontroller with a couple input pins and ethernet output. Is there a special term for this or any particular recommendations?

Answer 1

In my experience, any microcontroller with an on-board Ethernet peripheral will probably suit your needs – some manufacturers do better deals on dev boards and limited compilers than others, so that may influence you. Check out Microchip, TI, Freescale and Keil (third party – but good tools).

Depending on how much work you want to do (in reverse order of time-to-burn!):

• Buy a development board from anybody that has Ethernet already on board and working code samples.
• Buy a development board that has a MCU with an Ethernet peripheral, but no code samples.
• Design your own Ethernet hardware around a MCU with an Ethernet peripheral and write/debug
  your own code and hardware.

Just my 2c! Have fun.

p.s. And don’t forget to test out the IDEs before you buy a dev board. There is a huge difference in quality around MCU development environments and it will directly affect your experience…