[Julesomega]

A lot of questions for anyone who could help me to learn how to use microcontrollers for embedded control. A friend is going to give me an introduction to Python which is taught in schools these days and as soon as I can emulate a set of traffic lights I shall start on the real business.

My immediate goal is to generate the code to drive the AD9850/AD9851 DDS Signal Generator Modules which you can buy a lot cheaper than having a crystal cut, plus you can emulate an entire bank of crystals with one module.

My first question then is what device to choose as controller. People use Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Seeeduino for this sort of thing, but they seem overkill as they could pilot a spaceship to Mars, plus you need a shield or some such interface. The original microcontroller was the Peripheral Interface Controller from Microchip but PICs now qualify as vintage technology on these pages so what do people recommend for simple control? I don't think I need ADC, though it would provide the simplest switching for multiple frequency use. I'm hoping boards can be bought ready populated with the controller and presumably a serial interface for loading the code.

The second question is what language to use for generating the code. Life's too short to try learning machine code, and speed is not important in this application, unless one wanted to modulate the generator with audio. I was assuming that C++ is the language of choice used by us hardware engineers, but should I be considering a later language or something object oriented?