Why not so many HC908 .asm projects?

[Circlotron]

Everywhere I look people are doing stuff with pics and avrs and stuff I never heard of. I do all my stuff in assembler on Motorola HC908 micros. Okay, so assembler might not be the language of choice for everyone, but if one is using assembler, what is the attraction for other micros, especially pic?

[ataradov]

It probably has something to do with overall popularity of the Motorola MCUs. I honestly was sure that HC08 is dead, so I had to go to digikey and check. They seem to to be more expensive and are not so rich on peripherals.

[AlfBaz]

probably the eco system that you find lacking on the HC908 ie. a large code base, large community, plenty of support etc

[Marco]

HC08 was popular, a decade ago before any of the manufacturers really started to get hobbyist focused ... PIC was first, then AVR. It's hard to make a dent in PIC/AVR's first mover advantage without a whole lot of PR (like TI and to a lesser extent ST have done).

As for HC08, I don't think Freescale even has a low cost starter kit for it ... it's basically in the same boat as 8051 and 6502.

[westfw]

For a long time, the Motorola microcontrollers were difficult to purchase in anything smaller than "production" quantities.  IIRC, they were also relatively late to Flash technology, leaving the "reprogrammable" category to (very expensive) UV-erasable parts.

[amyk]

They're not particularly hobbyist-friendly and Motorola/Freescale MCUs tend to be found more in automotive applications.