PICs - Playground or 'serious' microcontroller

[leisryan]

Does anybody in this forum, still go to Curches nowadays? hehehe kiddin'

[Ryan7777]

you'll never please this guy..
he's one of those people who think it takes at least a $20,000 piece of equipment to be sure that there is no ripple on a $10 regulated output wal-wart... i can tell you VERY important things to the worlds safety, (or your harm, if your a bad guy) contain PIC micros.... or whatever is at hand to do the job and get the job done for as cheap as possible.. you wouldnt believe the number of obsolete components in things you would think should be top of the line!! (use your imagination..). the point is, a good engineer or technician will make anything work perfectly if its important enough.. using whatever.. and how about radar? guess what, they still use... VACUUM TUBES.. yes, good ol' wwII era valves.. sure there are things that are brand spanking new out there that can do the same job.. but not as well at the power level's needed.. and why all this? because the war business doesnt drive the market.. consumer goods do. so while you enjoy your ipod with its 2000000 GHz processor spitting out your timberlake... remember that there ARE things out there that have no where near the power and do much, much more important jobs... that have to work no matter what... it all just depends on the need at hand. and look at the number of ipod failures.. lockups, bad firmware... every microcontroller can fail or have problems.

[presario1425]

selbstdual, would you consider Nike and iPod's engineers to be professionals? If your answer is yes, then check this out:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pre...iPod-Internals

They seem to think a PIC16F688 is ok.

What about you?

[muddy0409]

OK, PICs in security equipment?
The range of panels made by CADDX (USA) and sold in Australia as NX-4, NX-8 etc by Direct alarm Supplies are ALL built around PICs.
Also the range of PARADOX panels (Canada), sold in Australia by Security Merchants also are built around PICs.
Bound to be more out there that I don't know about 'cos I don't use them..

[T.Jackson]

Bet your mouse has one - I recall reading that in the Silicon Chip magazine some many years ago. This was when PICs were first introduced into the publication back around 99. How about modern-day optical ones, is that statement still applicable?

[picnaut]

Hello,

I know that this post is a little late (a few months after-the-fact actually), but I’m sorry, Selbstdual is mentally challenged (I’d use the term “retard”, but I’m trying to be politically correct here). He obviously has no clue about engineering.

I work for a company that generates billions of dollars worth of revenue each year.
We have a strong presence in security, medical and safety.
We use PICs in lots of devices.
We also use Atmels in similar devices.

We had an interface board for a mobile video recorder (the kind the cops rely on) that used a PIC.
Well, we had to rev the board due to an obsolete OSD chip.
Since the original PIC code was written in assembly, and the engineer who was in charge of the re-design was an Atmel fan (and had a C-compiler), the PIC was replaced with an Atmel processor. That’s when we started having problems. The first wave of returns was caused by a code bug created by the engineer. It turned out to be easily fixed and we moved on. A year later we got another wave of returns. This time it was because Atmel made a small change without proper notification to their suppliers, or changing the part number, and our code broke because of it.

To make a long story short, a lot of a product’s reliability is dependent on the engineer not the part used. As for the PIC being a reliable part, Microchip has sold billions of them for a reason. There is no way, at their relatively low cost, that those sales were mainly to hobbyists. That’s a joke. One would have to be on glue to think so.



Picnaut

[picnaut]

These guys ONLY use PICs in their devices and their equipment is responsible for protecting lives every day.

http://www.critical-environment.com/

P.S.
By the way, the company I work for...think "bees" and the movie "The Ring".