[onegreenev]

Silicon Labs Development Boards & Kits - 8051

Worth diving into?

 

[CKidder]

Silicon Labs Development Boards & Kits - 8051

Worth diving into?

It depends. What do you want to do with it? The Tesla BMS module boards are powered by a SiLabs C8051 so there's a definite use case there. They're decent enough 8 bit processors and seem to be fairly power efficient. The assembly syntax for those processors isn't really that bad. I've seen much more irritating instruction sets (I'm looking at you PowerPC!)

If you're interested in a fairly full featured 8 bit processor that's reasonably easy to develop firmware for, then the C8051 processors from SiLabs aren't too shabby.

Really, I'm surprised when people use 8 bit processors these days. They aren't usually that much cheaper than bigger, faster, more full featured alternatives like the ARM Cortex M3. But, I suppose they're likely more power efficient and that counts in some instances. I think I'd rather use a C8051 processor than a PIC8 or ATMega.

 

[kennybobby]

Once you learn one assembly language instruction set there is little motivation to learn another--i've been reversing 8051 code since 1984 so it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks...