On 5/25/13 7:22 AM, Bob Camp wrote:
Hi
PIC's have been around for a *long* time. The PIC16's came early on and were
followed by the PIC18's. Both are a bit dated at this point. The PIC24's and
dsPIC33's are actually very similar parts. The PIC33's form a third family
pretty much on their own. A modern version of the Microchip programmer will
flash any of the parts. I have never seen a cheap eprom programmer that will
program a PIC. The Microchip programmers are dirt cheap, so that's not a real
problem.
I'd strongly recommend getting one of the starter kits for the dsPIC33 and play
with it for a while. It should come with a cpu, a programmer, and a ton of
information. The toolchain is pretty simple to use and it's free.
-----------------
All that said, the Arduino empire is pretty hard to beat when it comes to
mashing together a simple little light blinker. The key issue is being able to
use cheap China assembled boards off of the auction sites. Time wise, and even
cost wise it's better than doing layouts and soldering up stuff. Another option
are the demo boards that the semiconductor companies flog off for next to
nothing. The Freescale Freedom board ($12) is one example out of hundreds. The
project cost is *never* about the CPU, it's always about all the other stuff
around it.
If the objective is to complete a very simple, low powered project and be done
with it, go with the Arduino. If the objective is to learn an empire, be very
careful about which empire you pick. The ARM boys are quickly gobbling up a lot
of territory that once was populated by a number of competing CPU's. Learning
this stuff, and getting good at it is a significant investment of time.
If you're interested in ARM (in the long run), and find the arduino
ecosystem interesting :there are enormous numbers of add on "shields"
for Arduino, and lots of example code of varying quality around.
take a look at the Teensy3 from PJRC.. $19, it's a Freescale Kinetis
microcontroller with ARM, a fair amount of RAM and flash, but can use
either the Arduino IDE (teensyduino.. has all the libraries, in source,
to support the plethora of onchip peripherals in the Kinetis) or native
tools for the ARM.
One Arduino peripheral that's not readily available, and would be of
interest to time-nuts, is a high resolution DAC. the Arduino (and
teensy, for that matter) have the usual PWM. You can get a I2C
interface MCP4725 12-bitDAC from adafruit on a little daughter card
(with bypass caps, etc.), but I've not found something like a low noise
16bit DAC.
A decent DAC and the teensy, and I think you could do a very nice
Disciplined XO.. the Kinetis has a pretty complete set of
counters/timers/what-have-you that you can interconnect by setting bits
in the hundreds of control registers, once you figure out how (yep,
you'll love that 1600 page manual)
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