On 28 Jul, 00:55, JeffM wrote:
coyoteboy wrote:
As an "academic" task I'm looking through the options for
microprocessors that are relatively easy to program

Heh. Dreamer. 8-)
There is a newsgroup that speciaizes in this.
If you are going to dabble, you should start reading it.
I'll give you some sample threads (plus 1 for starters):http://groups.google.com/group/sci.e...e_frm/thread/3...

Is there a site[...]that compares the available architectures,
simplicity/expense of the programming hardware/softare etc?
I seem to only find commercially biased sites[...]
[...]picaxe[...]AVR ATMega[...]basic stamp[...]

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....e_frm/thread/a...

[...]and dont require expensive hardware

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.e...roup:comp.arch....


Thanks for those links, I appreciate the effort you put in there. It
does look like the Atmel AVRs are a good option, obviously cheap and
good are mutually exclusive and I'd rather have good than cheap. I
think I'll look deeper at them.

Thanks!
James