It's getting to be about time for me to update the 8052.com Book. I'm having conflicting thoughts on the 8052.com SBC, though.

I designed the 8052.com SBC not because I thought the world necessarily needed yet another SBC, but because I wanted a real-world working platform that topics and examples in the book could be based on. That is, I didn't just want to discuss things like SPI and I2C theoretically on some hypothetical hardware that didn't physically exist. I wanted a reader to be able to get the 8052.com SBC (or build it himself) and then really be able to try the code in the book and understand it in operation. At the time, I also wanted the SBC to use a traditional implementation with a latch, some external memory, etc. so that the reader could get better understand the differences between MOVC, MOVX, etc. because they were actually accessing different ICs on the board. The SBC also includes a number of features (SPI, I2C, keypad, LCD) that serve to demonstrate those topics in the book.

Now, as it comes time to update the book I don't know how I feel about the 8052.com SBC.

The SBC was designed using parts that were easy to find and easy to solder so that anyone could built one with a soldering iron. However, the 32k SRAM is getting hard to find in a DIP presentation and it seems that even the AT89S8253 is getting harder to find in DIP--at the very least it looks like Digikey is no longer stocking the part in its DIP presentation. This is going to make it harder for people to build the SBC because the parts are getting increasingly hard to find; if I redesign for a surface-mount approach it's not particularly easy for the typical hobbyist to build either.

One option is to redesign for surface-mount and simply sell the board online. Readers wouldn't really be able to build the board themselves but rather would have to buy them pre-built. I don't consider this ideal but at least there'd still be a real-world platform that could be purchased by the reader.

Another option is to simply write my book around an existing SBC or development kit.

My hesitations there are that most such boards don't have external RAM (the traditional 8052 memory layout is not demonstrated) and most likely don't have all the components I cover in the current book (I2C, SPI, keypad, LCD in both direct-connect and memory-mapped mode) and perhaps some new components I'd like to add in the new book (perhaps an SD card, perhaps Phillip Gallo's video circuit, etc.). Not because those are typical functions in an average 8052 design, but because a lot of PIC books provide "neat" projects like that and I think it would be helpful to do the same.

So I'm in a quandary as to how to proceed. Should I redesign the 8052.com SBC as a surface-mount device even though that pretty much means any reader that wants it will have to buy it from 8052.com rather than building it himself? Should I go with an existing development kit or SBC even though it doesn't provide all the features that I might want to cover in the book? There are a lot of development kits that have a price far more attractive than what I could offer, but they also don't have all the features I'd like to cover in the book.

Or perhaps the book doesn't need the 8052.com SBC at all; topics could just be discussed hypothetically as most books do and if the reader wants to try it, he has to built it himself.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Craig Steiner