Good design
This is a great idea. My only suggestions would be a bootloader and PIC18F parts. I haven’t looked at the dsPIC or PIC24, can they “self program” ? No matter what language you choose, the final output file will be a .HEX file. It would be nice to just send it down the serial link ( or USB ) to the board and run, just like the PICAXE does. Simple bootloaders can be written that take less than 256 bytes of memory.
Constrained by a mac?
The (tragic?) result of my work is that I wound up with a macbook pro.
I’m not going to labour my opinions of a mac here, but when trying to find out which uC I could use, solarbotics suggested a picaxe, because it can be easily interfaced with a mac.
Having not tried anything else at this stage, I have no idea of the extent to which this is accurate, but it certainly seems to be consistent with what I see.
I would dearly like to have the time and money to use pics - getting the interface hardware for my mac, and learning the code etc. etc., but at present, I think the picaxe is very appropriate for what I want to do.
Macbook pro tragic,
Macbook pro tragic, never!!! Vmware or paralles is your friend. Bootcamp would be an option as well.
Hmmmm.
Welllll, I wanted to avoid having to use emulation software - there’s something klugey about it… having a lot of sofware on my computer so it behaves like a different computer just seems … I don’t know, like i’m defeating the purpose.
But!, I must step back and see the bigger picture. Maybe tomorrow though.
Cool
I’ve been running OS X 10.5.7 as well for iPhone programming. I’m a windows/linux guy, but have been impressed by the latest apple stuff. You could use the gnu toolset for PIC programming on your Mac: http://gputils.sourceforge.net I use MPLAB and the C30 compiler on a Vista machine. I was going to try VMware to see if I could use my Windows tools on my Mac.
New to LMR, not new but novice PIC user
I started off programming Basic Stamps then PICs at school through Higher and Advanced Higher Technological Studies in my final years of High School/(Secondary School to us Brits). While learning assembly at school I bought myself a PIC programmer and a few PIC16F84As and used them in a few robots. I moved to JAL as I realised assembly was slowing me down and I didn’t need to be working in such a low level language for the pretty simplistic stuff I was doing. I haven’t touched PICs in over 5 years (moved away from robots and tinkering with electronics until recently) and although I’ve quickly grown to love the Arduino Mega I’ve been playing with I would love to jump back to using PICs if a project came up where it would be better suited.
