I was a field application engineer for Microchip from 2008-2011, making POCs for big name customers in the bay area using 8, 16 and 32-bit PICs.
You will likely find that Microchip support is awful, even if their products are pretty neat. There was an Arduino port for PICs called "ChipKit" but I don't know if that's still being developed. The PicKit 3 is decent, if pretty slow. The ICD3 and later versions are good. MPLAB X is excellent IMO. I should still hold a design partner discount so if you want to get some tools, contact me offline and I'll see if I can save you some money. That all said, I'm a huge fan of the STM32 ARM devices and the community is nearly as good as Nordic, and what Atmel used to be before it was acquired by Microchip. -- Anders Nelson On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 4:26 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/3/21 10:47 AM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote: > > > Any gotchas with the PICKit-3 clones out there? I have the feeling > > > that sticking with PIC would be better than trying to port to > > > Arduino, and imagine that as things continue to age there will be > > > more applications for interfaces. Any better but still cheapish > > > alternatives for programming? > > > > IIRC the PK-3 doesn't get any new device support at this point. > > Existing stuff continues to work. Depending on the nature of the > > devices you might want to use in the future, it might be worth > > considering a PK-4. > > I've used a PK-2 on PIC32MX devices. I used MPLAB for a time, but > OpenOCD also supports it. After all, it's JTAG, sort of. > > What chips specifically? On the PIC12 through PIC18 devices, I used the > JDM cheapie with PonyProg. Of course, you need a real serial port--I > don't know of a USB one will work. > > Personally, you might find it more interesting to go with some of the > STM32 ARM Cortex MCUs. Many are 5V tolerant and will probably be around > for a long time. There's even an Arduino suite or two for the low-end > ones. > > --Chuck > > > >
