I am getting use to Parallax basic stamp and find it easy software to use. Curious about PIC processors. They have many kinds and sizes. I am interestted with as much I?O as possable and imfo on an inexpensive programming board and perhaps a proto board later. The programming language seems similar to me. What is the compairison besides price. I am not a beginner with electronics just programming. Any helpful imfo would be appreciatted. Thanks in advance.
PICs are widely available,
PICs are widely available, and as such there are many many dev boards around. Most of them are for the smaller PIC micros (14 to 40 pins), and they’re often built with certain jobs in mind - LCD control, motor drivers, PC interface, etc.
If you want a really good board, you’re better off building it yourself IMO. That’s the strength of the PIC development platform, versatility. A demo/proto board might be a good start to learn about PICs, but you lose flexibility by using a prebuilt board.
PICs are most commonly programmed in RISC Assembly, or using a C/C++, but you can get compilers for PICBASIC and other languages quite easily. Microchip.com is a great resource for micro information, dev boards, code examples and programming tools, I recommend you have a good browse through what they have to offer.
Thanks
Curious I just got this months of Nuts and Volts magazine and they have a development board called a Chameleon. It has a featured article that says it can handle both a PIC and Prop all in one. It also states it can handle several programming languages. I already have a Prop Development board but it is still untouched. Is the Chameleon a little overkill? I’ll checkout the Microchip site.
The Chameleon seems like a
The Chameleon seems like a good choice if you want to run video+audio output with possibly a mouse+keyboard setup as well, but if you’re not using it for that then the Chameleon is overkill. ~US$70 is a decent price for what they’re offering, but only if you actually make use of all the hardware.