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Hi, Now that I've finaly made debugging easier by adding serial port support to my OS I thought it would be fun to try and build a data logger that I could attatch to the computer. My idea was that it would have two modes, store and send. In store it would just store all the data recieved into some kind of secondary storage. For send, it would, after recieving a command from the OS, send all the data it has stored. My idea was to create a kind of 'mini' OS whose sole purpose would be to send the command to the logger and then print out all the data I recieved. This means I could easily review all the debug messages. I just have a few questions before embarking on this project.

1)Are there any particular microcontrollers you would recommend for a project like this? I've never really done much microcontroller programming except for the picaxe.

2)What form of secondary storage should I use? I was currently thinking of some form of EEPROM but is there an easier solution.

3) Is there any particular advice you would give for a project like this?

Thank you for your help.

1) I have a particular hatred of microcontrollers, and would much prefer myself to be using a full CPU/RAM/ROM set. But for you, I recommend the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. They're fairly RISCish and not to hard to get a head around. Another possibility is the Microchip PIC range of microcontrollers.

2) Buy a microcontroller with large enough onboard RAM. Or you could use their flash memory. If you need a large data store, perhaps external DRAM/SRAM chips would be the go. You can get ones with both parallel and serial interfaces. If you need persistent data, you might need a battery backup. Alternatively, there is Flash and EEPROM memory. Depending on how many samples a second you are doing though, it may be too slow. Also, I've never tried to in-place erase an EEPROM, but I'm assuming it won't be that easy (especially compared to RAM).

3) KISS.