I guess what I was looking for after doing more homework on the subject was possibly a review of Arduino vs Amicus18. Amicus seems to be Microchip's answer to the Arduino & it's a convincing argument. If I were making millions of these things the cost difference of the PIC18 vs the Atmega328 could really make a difference here, but I don't see a large market for a home based bio-fuel (gasoline) making device, so I can't imagine the price difference of a couple dollars is going to make much different.
Incidentally if you hear a large boom or happen to see a small mushroom cloud over Orem, it will probably mean I'm not going to be able to attend plug meetings for awhile :) Back to what got me on this subject, I have a programmer for the PIC 16 series (Velleman 8048) laying around that I got for my birthday a few years back, but I've never been much into ASM, C is about as bare wire as I get. The arduino & amicus both seem to have support for a variety of languages including C and just seem to exist for the sole purpose of making a microcontroller based system accessible to the layman. However I've made up my mind, after looking at the overall support and talking to customer service at both Microchip Direct & Mouser, it looks like the clear winner for speedy development with lots of community support is going to be an Arduino, supplied by Mouser. I have to admit they have the best customer service & sales team I've ever seen. I placed my order today & got a tracking number today. Just checked & my uno landed in Salt Lake a few hours ago. I'll keep you folks updated on my progress. Thanks for all the advice & keep it coming, I'm still very curious. On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08/18/2011 09:52 AM, John Shaver wrote: >>> Has anyone used either of this with any degree of success? >>> >> >> >> I am also interested to know more. I have looked at purchasing an >> Arduino unit for a while just to play around and see what it can do. >> Last I checked it wasn't extremely cheap though. Any success >> stories? > > Arduino seems cheap enough. If you want cheaper you can look at other > AtMega-based boards. Arduino is just an Atmega processor with a > standardized board, I/O interfaces, programming language and IDE, and > and the Arduino boot loader. The latter two aren't really required. > I've done some minor work on some code with straight avr-gcc and avrdude > and it was pretty straight forward to upload the code (through an avr > programmer). Also there are other microcontroller platforms, including > one that's compatible with Arduino's I/O stuff that is 32-bit. > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
