The power of a microcontroller

In the following video, the developer is using an Atmel microcontroller. This is an incredibly simple computer by today’s standards. It has a 20 megahertz processor with 1,024 bytes of RAM and 8.5 K bytes of ROM. He puts up a quick schematic at the 30 second point. You can see that he is using 3 on-board digital-to-analog converters to drive the red, green and blue lines of a VGA port, and another digital-to-analog converter to drive an audio line. Therefore, the creation of all the video signals is happening in software, and the actual creation of the video and audio content is happening in software, and somhow he is fitting it all into 8.5 kilobytes:

Parallax has a similar kind of thing (slightly more powerful), called the propeller chip. They also have a design contest going on right now:

Propeller chip

Look at the bottom of the page for specs. It has 32K bytes of RAM and 32K bytes of ROM.

The company describes it this way:

The Propeller is a good choice over other microcontrollers when a low system part count is desirable due to its ability to provide direct video output and an easy interface to external peripherals such as keyboard, mouse and VGA monitor. Pre-written objects to support many types of hardware also make it an attractive option. All of this plus low cost and a powerful, yet easy language are hard to beat in a world where microcontrollers come in so many flavors that it’s hard to make a choice. The Propeller really is an easy choice.

For more info see: How Microcontrollers Work