Is Picbasic good enough??

[toalan]

I agree Picbasic is easy, because it has support for most of the features, ADCIN,HPWM,Hserout etccc. With C you basically have to configure the registers yourself to access the hardare features. If you are not accessing the special hardware on the pic and just want to use the pic to crunch numbers then C is great.

I have problems with basic being too slow for my application, so I had to change my approach to get reasonable results. It has kind of been a blessing in disguise because now my approach is much much cleaner and requires less extra circuits. It is kind of tough to get used to picbasic being pretty slow, because in normal programming on the PC, I am so used to the hardware being so much faster than required. But sometimes an extra challenge is good and makes you think outside the box, I do not even recal the last time I needed to optimize my code to run faster on a PC.

[nomada]

I have to agree with TOALAN!
Most of the time we get in troubles just because we forget to think in terms of hardware/software relation.
Probably we forget sometimes that each designs may need a different aproach.
YES, PBP looks easy, it has good features built in, the support is very good, comparing with similar software I will give it an 8 (in a 0 to 10 scale - giving it a 10, probably Melabs would stop improvements)

[mister_e]

Everything is in the coding style... using internal registers or few lines of code instead of some statements like pre-made ADCIN,BUTTON, HPWM and many other helps really... just be friends with Datasheets... everything is in.

[toalan]

there is a big problem with mixing assembly with PBP, many times when we use PBP we have no idea which registers PBP changes so when you do assembly that uses those registers things go wacky. For example if you use HPWM and want to use TMR2 for a counter driven interrupt things can screw up.

[Melanie]

If you read the DATASHEET you will discover that the PIC requires use of TMR2 for timing PWM functions. If you used Assembler with Hardware PWM you would still need to use TMR2 - there's no escaping it. There are no secrets regarding what PBP does or doesn't do to registers behind the scenes - it's all in the DATASHEET if only people bothered to look at them for anything more than the pinout diagram.

[rastan]

ok, were not having a dig here, i just wanted to find out whether it was worth with sticking with learning C for pic or just stick with the nice and simple picbasic.

cheers everyone

phil

[Twasnow]

I agree though, people should understand the processor they are using at a level deeper than the basic programming langauge, we aren't programming away on glorified 3 million man hour operating systems that we can take comfert in knowing it will stop us from doing things too stupid. But that is just lazyness and doesn't really answer the question "is picbasic good enough", in a word or so the answer is forty-two. The important thing here is the question. No not 7 times 6, "is picbasic good enough for what?". You decide, depends on your programming ability, and your task. as a defence for C, in my opinion it is just as easy to write in as Basic, and I have yet to meet a C compiler that doesn't have a slew of I/O functions. or a useable debugger, but that said I wouldn't want to plop someone infront of a C compiler that doesnt' know A) anything about the chip and B) C language. where as basic, I could get my unborn nefew to write me up a simple program, (well in a few years, when he learns a little bit of english.)

- my only suggestion, would be to include a little more code optimization at complie time (I am not even sure if there is any)

Twasnow

[Bruce]

Like riding a bike your first time - it's only hard or intimidating until you learn it. C is similar to BASIC in many ways, but it does have a much longer learning curve.

I recommend you learn assembly at some point also since you can drop-in .asm routines that will speed things up where canned functions aren't an option.

C is a lot of fun, and a good C compiler offers a lot of built-in goodies you just won't find in any BASIC compiler, but the BASIC language is hands-down the easiest to start with & see immediate results.

The BASIC Stamp is a good indicator. Lots of folks get started with the Stamp then migrate to more powerful (and much less expensive) alternatives like the PIC & BASIC compilers.

Part of my job is evaluating compilers. PBP & Proton+ are the best (IMO) at present. CCS & Hi-Tech in the C category - with CCS being the best for beginners. Tons of examples with CCS to get you started.