So :)
There seems to be a good ammount of people here from both the picaxe and arduino camps, im an arduino man myself and havent really played with any pic kits.
What id like to know is if there is any advantage with one over the other, or even any other alternatives?
Whats your preference on things?
Chips, Chips and more Chips
Hi all,
I have used the PIC’s and Arduinos, for playing with the type robot we see here the Arduino is a great choice, but it is not the chip (ATmega) It is the development environement and the large number of people developing stuff and sharing.
I have been trying to learn DSP coding useing the DSPIC30F2010 which is a really interesting family.
When you are considering the smaller chips PIC is a good choice the only think I think is the Hardware PWM in the ATMega gives it an advantage over the PIC’s, the PIC’s typically supporting less pins.
The Microchip guys provide a good development environment and some great data sheets.
There is a huge amount of people working with the Microchip/Atmel/Arduinos so any is a good choice.
You can find compilers for a lot of languages for all of these chips.
I started cutting code using fortran on punched cards. Then assembler, but my first love is C, a good complier will generate code reasonably close to what you can do hand coding in Assemblier.
Languages, all have advantages and disadvantages, most dislike a language as they have not spent enough time with it, once you start to thinking in the language you have got it beat.
Horses for courses
… is a saying that some developers have had regarding what micro to use. AVR vs PIC is a debate area, which I would probably prefer AVR on, due to more getting done per clock cycle on an AVR. Now Arduino vs PICAxe is more of one interpreted language against another, since I think the development environment might be made in other chips. I’m saying it might be possible for someone to code PICAxe BASIC to run on an AVR, and vice versa, to have Arduino psuedo-C operating on a PIC, if anyone felt like trying such a project. There are probably indiosyncrasys of each that make the language/firmware more capable on native hardware though.
Older 8 bit micros before the AVR and PIC include the 68HC11, 8051, and many others. Wikipedia has a good overview, including Harvard and Von Neumann architectures if you want to dig into that. 16 bit micros would be the MSP430, dsPIC and DSP5600, 32 bit include the ARM7 LPC2000 series and Coldfire devices. The bit number refers to how much data the device can compute at a time, including instruction size I believe.
For me, I’ve played with Parallax Basic, GCC for AVR, IsoMax for DSP56F8xx. I’d like to work more with AVRs, including doing a bit of Arduino coding. I’d also like to use some C version on some ARM devices, maybe an LPC2148. Maybe an ARM9 too. And some PC level coding to make an interface for robots, so I’m watching what people try for the internet robot projects here.
Good question to ask
If you want to know what flavour icecream people like though wouldnt you say 
PIC
I am a fan of the PIC/PICAXE family. In most cases, I don’t need a super beefy micro. Most of my applications have both remote and local processing in that they interface with a PC at some point. Most of the decision making and heavy lifting is done on the PC and “reported” back to the PICAXE. So, I stick with inexpensive and easy to program MCUs.
