As Ryan Holiday once put it in his book Perennial Seller, “You have to find your addicts.” Taking some context
from the Google Analytics world (yes, I am watching you right now, and no, you did not sign a GDPR waiver as this
site is not EU-based), you have to find out who your audience is and what they want.
Apparently, the code I wrote a few years back about the MCS-51 series and Chinese clones is still getting substantial
traffic and seems to be quite popular among folks from Asia. Let’s be honest, STCMicro actually greatly improved the original AT89 and AT90 series as part of the STC89C52 series.
Quite honestly, I did not plan to use these chips in production at the time. I used coding them as a means to see if
I could turn this into a teaching tool for my kids, and at the same time have a project to pass COVID-19 lockdown anxiety. So the original content was more of a
“let’s see if I can do this” exercise and left off at how you build and integrate a simple hello world program from
conception, running on hardware, to simulating it for CI/CD.
I still have a few kits lying around from STCMicro that I bought back then.
While the STC89C52 seems to be the most prolific in Chinese products, there are
other great chips from STC too. I really like the STC8H series, which is a 1T
MCS-51 variant with a lot of modern features, like USB. Then there is also the STC15 and STC12 series, where they again recreated some of the legacy Atmel (now Microchip) chips with modern features.
I am planning to turn this more into an embedded series. If anyone from STC or a similar outfit is reading this, I would be
happy to get some samples to play with and write about (see Social links below to connect and chat), including
non-8051-based MCUs too.
So I added the 8051 category, and you will see more work on this in the near future.
Yes, I see these Jiu-Jitsu search terms coming in too. Given that I’m still recovering from my knee injury,
I am abstaining from Jiu-Jitsu, Karate sparring, and contacts sports for now. There will be more on kata, judging, and
non-contact training for a while. I have a few drafts on Hojo Undo, but
I wanted to wait until I can get a critical mass of folks in either my Shito-Ryu or Goju-Ryu clubs interested in this
to turn this into a practical seminar series.
Published: 2025-10-19
Updated : 2025-10-19
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