Goodbye

[Dave]

Lester, Please keep me in mind if you are going to UNLOAD any of the current Amicus boards. I heard talk of you maybe laying out a new one. I have been using the few I have purchased at work the last few months and have incorporated them into a few test systems. I currently load them with PIC18F27K40's running PBP3.1 with a boot loader. Beats the heck out of Arduino's. I also like the way you layed out the board with the ports. I sure beats the PICAXE layout. Thanks for all you do....

[Ioannis]

@Lester:

Does the Amicus web site work? It says that it does not work.
Availability and price is a serious factor for a product success. If one has to pay, say 20 euros for the product and 30 to get it by post or courier, I doubt it that orders will come. Unfortunately, China is to far away in this.

@queenidog:

With PBP or Proton Basic, you do things really fast and easy. And they can be used for professional projects too. With Arduino this is not true, as many of the libraries are made by hobbists and may crash or work but with errors.

True that it has a wide base with a lot of lib's and many really cheap shields especially from China, but the question is, can you trust all these things? Other than the easy of use and programming.

Ioannis

[astanapane]

You all miss the real point.

PBP is dying not because there is no interest from the people, but because of major personalities left. Those personalities were helping in here with coding, examples and most of the times, they have spend many hours to explain to newbies and hobbyist the basics. That was the selling point for PBP.

Now i feel like there are only 2 or 3 persons would really like to help, and all the others are looking to make money.

If i had to start now with microcontrolllers, i would go to Arduino, because as a hobbyist i need to do what i ask for in a matter of short of time and fast as hell.

PBP offers the simplicity with a wonderful IDE.

I have no choice to leave or stay. I do not make leaving out of this.

This is only my opinion and as i feel like a hobbyist. I do make simple things for my home, and for my kinds.

If the developers were smart enough to understand the money income from the hobbyist market, i think PBP would be the top of the line IDE of all times.

There are little documented and categorized examples, and all the others are here and there with broken information.

[Ioannis]

This is not fair.

Have you checked this: http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/content.php?r=5

and this: http://dt.picbasic.co.uk/

Many good examples and a lot of info.

Ioannis

[astanapane]

This is not fair.

Have you checked this: http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/content.php?r=5

and this: http://dt.picbasic.co.uk/

Many good examples and a lot of info.

Ioannis

The book of DT's , i think it is also a part of your wonderful job. It looks like a STAR in the darkness.

But comparing those examples to ARDUINO expanded libraries, which every day there is an update to any bug or additional info to the current ones. It is not comparable.

Everywhere on the internet there is a help file, a help library and start up code for each application.

Anyway now it is late to talk about all these. My luck of knowledge and experience is not enough to make comments. I only said my opinion as a hobbyist. What i receive from this forum as a user is that there are only 3 people running like hell, to cover all the user's needs, and at the end of the day they are fed up to give the right info and positive directions.

[richard]

Now i feel like there are only 2 or 3 persons would really like to help, and all the others are looking to make money

I have never seen anyone really ask for money here, but expecting libraries to be produced for no reward so you can hobby away with
minimal effort is a big ask. i'm always prepared to help but want to see a genuine effort beforehand. just asking for code won't cut it .
I feel that my code could be updated and make better use of the packet engine. if I scrap the backwards combability requirement and maybe even use a small fixed length payload it could be simplified a bit too. I managed to learn a few new tricks bouncing ideas off mike k8lh on the nokia lcd project so these things aren't reward less if you collaborate with the right people . I'm open to suggestion.
nb.
even if some sort of lib is created you realise of course that pbp has no native spi commands . I would expect it to use
some asm and USERCMDS , you have shied away from these things in the past and are you even prepared
to upgrade to pbp3 ?

ARDUINO expanded libraries, which every day there is an update to any bug or additional info to the current ones

don't believe that at all , many libs have major defects that are never addressed. the rfm12b lowpower labs library has never been fixed and
has major bugs just waiting to bite the novice [bugs are often alluded to in the forums, seldom described adequately, seldom fixed]

[Scampy]

For me I tend to lurk around this forum less frequent than I used to. I've not used my EasyPIC5 board to program PICs via PB Pro for a few years now. The last project I worked on (hobby project) was Arduino based because it had readily available library files that suited the modern hardware (TFT screens) I wanted to use. Yes I too found I was spending more time sorting out syntac errors and typos etc, and the structure seemed alien after using basic for so many years, but everything in life is swings and roundabouts. Yes if funds permitted upgrading to PB3 which might have made things easier, but my personal circumstances has meant that I've never been able to justify the upgrade cost which would have included a new EasyPIC board to support modern PICs to make use of the functions PB3 offer.

There was a similar thread http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=21146 I started a couple of years back and since then I've noticed less and less posts on the forum. I'm guessing that with more and more one board computers coming out that offer far more than an Arduino or a basic PIC people are moving away from the whole project development side of things, where PCBs are designed and built around the PIC, which for me was all part of the fun.

I would agree that it's the people that make this forum, and sadly more and more of the core experienced members have moved away. The loss of DT impacted the forum immensely, and may have been the turning point for the decline. His library of include files filling the gaps left in PBPro and making things a lot more easy to use and efficient. Only a handful of old members still regularly post (Richard, Henrik, Ioannis etc) and should they frequent the forum less and less then the forum will simply gather cobwebs as an archive.

Its a shame things have got in this situation as BASIC is for a lot of people easy to pick up and understand, but IMO PBP has slipped in to decline and has now been left behind. Before Arduino became as main stream as it is now, MikroElectronika was PBP main competition, and they continue to support new hardware both physically through their main development boards and add on modules, but also in their compilers. PBP was slow to follow suit and as mentioned, been left way behind to a point now where it is too costly to catch up.

Anyway, that's my take on things....

[Alberto]

Well, I have to say that while I was learning (and still learning) to code in python 3, I have found all the library in use in my code all well and professionally documented. I think python is the computer programming language better documented today.

Alberto