Hello.

I'm not entirely sure whenever this is the right place to ask my questions, but I'll give a try.

I do some electronics gadget, for which I needed simple automation tasks - say sent defined number of pulses over certain amount of time, get data from RTC and log specific voltages for some time and so on.

I wanted simpler and easier solution, so I checked online and selected parallax basic stamp. While I liked the documentation, guides and ease of use, I don't liked a price I have to pay, to integrate basic stamp solution in my project. I don't need propeller, basic stamp is enough for me, but I needed CHEAPER solution. So this is why I decided to go to more advanced level. I googled further and found MIKROE website. All descriptions and things looked great, so I bought their PIC KIT (includes manuals, easy pic board v.7, usb dongle, lcd screens, etc). When it all arrived, I shortly found out that it was just glittery paper - documentation incomplete, proto board of very low quality, support very agressive and anti-customer oriented. So, I decided to give up with MIKROE and look for something different.

PIC BASIC Pro appears to be promising, but I have a couple of questions, answers for which I hope to receive here:

Can I use Easy Pic v.7 development board (programmer, hardware, incd debugger) with pic basic pro ?

As I can guess from sample code provided with trial of picbasic pro, the syntax is quite limited, compared to basic stamp, and for each MCU used, you have to know and remember names of all registers, output-input ports, mode of ports and so on. So, for example when with basic stamp you say simply type text like PORT(X)=1 and it will set port #1 high, regardless of MCU used, here you can't do the same, you have first to know which MCU uses which naming for ports, and then use the command?

Also, in basic stamp, you knew which stamp was able doing which command. Here, you have no data, right? for example, I'm pretty sure, 16F628 and 18F455 are totally different and 455 can do much more than 628 do, right?

Thanks in advance,

Alex