[time-nuts] Good (cheap) PIC chip choice for project?

KD0GLS kd0gls at mninter.net
Sat May 25 18:39:13 EDT 2013


On 25 May 2013, at 15:22, Bob Camp wrote:

> If you are going to code on a cheap PIC (the PIC16 series) you will likely need to learn PIC assembler. All my coding on those parts was in assembly language. They are old enough / slow enough / small RAM enough that things like C (or the other high level languages you listed) really don't do well on them. 


Well, not to be argumentative, but that certainly hasn't been my experience.  The overwhelming majority (95+%) of code I've written for PICs (numbering in the high tens of thousands of lines) has been written in C and with overwhelming success.  I've used it both professionally and casually on 8-bit devices ranging from PIC18F all the way down to PIC10F with little trouble.  While I agree there will always be a place for assembly language on smaller devices and for certain applications, I would never conclude that well written C "doesn't do well" on PIC16s.  Furthermore, today's PIC16F product line is quite broad, including several higher-performance parts which make coding in C even more attractive.  They aren't all "old" and all "slow", at least in their product class.  

73,
Brent, KD0GLS, Minneapolis



More information about the time-nuts mailing list