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

Bob Camp lists at rtty.us
Sat May 25 19:35:22 EDT 2013


Hi

It always depends on what you are trying to do and what you are happy with as a result. Back when packing lots of stuff into a PIC mattered, the only way I could get it done (literally millions of lines of code spread across many dozens of projects) was with assembler. The C compilers that were available back then, and the compromises they required just didn't get enough done …

Bob

On May 25, 2013, at 6:39 PM, KD0GLS <kd0gls at mninter.net> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
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