Re: uC Slection for a learner project

AC Me wrote:

I would like to construct a data logger. This data logger may be
located in areas remote from power and human kind. It will read 1-Wire
interfaced weather instruments at an interval of 2 seconds and store
the weather data over an extended period of time, such as a year.

That's not going to be cheap. You're talking about several tens of megabytes of data there!

The
weather data acquired should be stored with the date and time.

That's at least 3 bytes for the time-stamp alone, and you would be storing 15 million samples per year. That makes 45 MB before you've stored the first bit of actual payload data.

1. Very small power consumption. It would be nice if the uC would be
capable of operating from the merest suggestion of a hint of a
picowatt :)

2. A 1-Wire interface would be nice. This would make the development
process easier.

I'm afraid that combination is flat-out impossible. The 1-wire protocol itself burns a lot more than a pico-watt on average, what with the line drivers fighting against the pull-up resistor every bit of the way.

3. The ability to store perhaps 2GB of data. I believe this would
require the means to either write/read a MMC/SD card or a USB memory
device (a memory stick, I believe these are called).

A micro with a USB host implementation would be way beyond your power budget. Writing flash is in itself quite an energy-consuming operation.

6. The ability to transfer the stored data to a PC. If a USB memory
device (stick) is used then this is already addressed, assuming that
FAT is used. If MMC/SD then an appropriate reader could be used - but
this would push up the overall cost. An alternative might be to have
some form of high speed data transfer mechanism, e.g. 10/100/1000
ethernet or possibly a USB port for communication with the PC.

No, those wouldn't be alternatives, cost-wise, to a simple memory card reader for the PC to be equipped with. Those are on the order of 10$ a pop, retail.
.

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