JW wrote:
Along the same line: anyone on here doing PIC programming or know of a list for beginners? From CW keyers to Antenna control units and everything in between it looks like it would be fun to program some gadgets for around the shack...
Without lighting up a PIC/AVR flamewar, I've pretty much entirely moved from PIC to AVR. The hardware is generally two to four times faster for the same clock rate (gets more done per cycle) and is easier to program - you can make up an AVR programmer for the parallel port that's basically three resistors!
Furthermore, the toolchain is much better for AVR - Microchip are only interested in pushing their frankly dreadful Windows-only MPLAB software, while Atmel actively contribute to avr-gcc, a cross-platform toolchain based on the industry standard gcc. The whole AVR community seems a lot better than the PIC one, and I say that as a long-standing user of PIC microcontrollers.
In short, PIC is great, but the community isn't as strong and the tools are rubbish. On the other hand, Microchip are always more than happy to sample parts and their customer support is *excellent*.
AVR is technically superior in pretty much every way, with an excellent community. Unfortunately Atmel's tech support are a dour bunch who are often hard to get good information out of, and not great at sending samples.
I haven't tried the ARM-based AVRs or the MIPS-based PICs yet, though. Those might be something to tempt me back to Microchip, if MIPS is as good as I remember it ;-)
Gordon