Just wanted to say goodbye and thank all the people who helped me with PBP the last 10 years. I'm pulling the plug on it and PIC microprocessors and going over to the t other side: Arduino hell.

Someone has really missed the mark regarding PBP and PICs. My PBP and Mecanique IDE are the best, most powerful, and easiest software to use, which I have been doing with my Lab x1 development system. I had a MikroElektronica system as well but used PBP for development instead of Mikro Basic. I sold the Mikro board when I saw the writing on the wall. I also got rid of my stock of about 1000 ICs: TTL and CMOS, and all my 555 and 556 chips.

I tried to find something that would allow me to program Arduino family MCUs (I'm talking boards like UNO, Leonardo, DUE, etc) using PBP and/or the IDE but no one has facilitated this operation. MELabs says nothing is in development. Too bad: there's a ton of money to be made if someone could make the link. Instead I had to learn that crappy C++ language, spending 3/4 of my time fixing typos or trying to figure out what the cryptic error message is telling me.

Why did I change? Because I like the idea of writing code and downloading to a development board that will also be the controller board. With PBP and PICS, I could do the development but didn't have a board to run: I had to MAKE that board. I did this a number of times and all boards eventually worked but all this took time to do. With Arduino for example, I can blink an LED 2 minutes after hooking up a board, then take the board and put it into service somewhere.

I had tons of inventory of PIC MCUs and 6 large binders for the 6 MCUs I used. They were heavily noted and had lots of stickies in them (like the PBP manual) because in 10 years I did a lot of crap!!! I threw out all the documentation, including all the laminated cheat sheets I made for processors.

Arduino has a large following of users. There is an application for everything under the sun. eBay sells a 37 sensor kit for Arduino (just plug in), for about $15. I now have more Arduino parts (sensors, relays, motors, LEDs, etc) and Arduino MCU boards than ever. I have 10 UNO's, a bunch of Leonardos, a dozen Minis, a Due. Some robotic kits I bought all had Arduino boards and "shields" (I have a bunch of shields too).

I looked at the Amicus product by Crownhill and that is EXACTLY what I talking about. THIS is what could have taken Arduino on if the price and availability would have been better. Meanwhile I've been churning out projects like crazy with Arduino, despite it's terrible front end (you can't even print from the IDE!).

So. No more PICs. No more PBP. (I'll keep it on my computer so I can show others how it great it was). I'll get rid of my LabX1 and programmer and other related hardware and cables I made up. I'll give away all my PIC chips (over 100 of them).

See ya. Thanks.