Re: 8051-class "learner" board - is it worth making one?

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

When you can buy a TI-Chipcon CC1100 which has an 8051 core, 32KB flash, 4KB
SRAM, AES co-processor, 8 channel 14-bit ADC and an ISM band RF transceiver
(~300-935kHz) for $2 retail, it's doubtful that you'll be overwhelmed with
interest.

zwsdotcom@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>This is a crosspost from comp.arch.embedded, with some enhancement.
>
>The story:
>I semi-accidentally acquired a fairly large quantity of surplus ROMless
>8051-class parts in DIP-40 packages. These include Intel and Signetics
>8031, 8032, and lots of Dallas DS80C310 and DS80C320. Along with them
>came a bunch of 6264 and 62256 SRAMs.
>
>Somewhere in my archives I have a layout for a board that takes a
>DIP-40 8031 and has 32K of program flash and either 2K, 8K or 32K of
>RAM. It also has a level-shifted serial port, and some miscellaneous
>headers for GPIOs and such.
>
>In this day and age, is it worth my while to do a production run of
>these boards and offer them for sale to get rid of the surplus chips? I
>would write a small bootloader and preload that into flash so you
>wouldn't need additional hardware to load code onto the board.
>
>I figure I could [afford to] sell an assembled board for ~USD35.
>
>When I posted the above in c.a.e I got some suggestions, including to
>ask the question again here.
>
>Is that old design of mine even useful as it is, or would I have to
>build something more exotic to make it interesting?