Re: Electronics Projects and PC Interfacing

[Danny Sauer <danny@dannysauer.com>]

Cooler than "turning an LED on and off" - not "cooler than other
microcontrollers". :)  The Atmels are definitely better supported by the
Linux community - not that the PICs are completely left out.

Though, from a compiler POV, I only ever used assembler on the PICs -
and that's available for free.  Everything I wanted to do with them was
clock-sensitive, and I just didn't like giving up control to a
high-level language like C.  Which, now that I say it aloud, indicates
to me that I've gone off the deep end when I'm calling C too high-level...

--Danny

Tim McDonough wrote:
> Nothing wrong with the PIC series at all. I'm not sure they have any
> "cooler features" when compared to the AVR. I've used quite a few PIC
> and Atmel parts both over the years. Hardware wise I think it's a toss
> up between the two and both have lots of commercial and hobbyist type
> support.
>
> The biggest advantage the AVR series have over the PIC in my opinion
> is the free AVR-GCC toolchain. There is no port of GCC for the PIC due
> to the architecture whereas you can have C, C++, Java, etc. for the
> AVR free for the downloading. The least expensive, well supported C
> compiler for the PIC runs around $200 for a command line version. More
> for an IDE that interfaces with the Microchip environment to get the
> debugger, etc.
>
> Tim
>
> Danny Sauer wrote:
>
>> Is there any particular reason not to investigate the cooler features on
>> the 8-bit PIC microcontrollers?

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