Quote Originally Posted by Bruce View Post
Any reason you would prefer the Xino over an Amicus18 board?
Bruce,

I really don't use PICs beyond the 8-pinners and and occasional 16F688 or 16F88. For bigger projects I use ZBasic, who have added a lot of low level features that I've requested. At my age (70), I haven't the time to learn (or debug) the low level techniques like you and Darrell plus I've always subscribed to the view behind the Basic dialects that there are far more experts in non-computer fields than there are computer experts who can write the code the former could use. PICAXE and Xino fit right into that. And, I'm a big fan of versatility (PIC, PICAXE, Genie E28 whatever that is). Finally, I'm just plain cheap.

This is from the web page where I ordered the Xino...
Designed to be the most economic way possible of running a PIC or PICAXE/Genie with Arduino shaped plug and play shields.

The inspiration for this adapter board came from a number of educational users. They said they wanted a child friendly development board like the XINO Pro but at pocket money prices. We like a challenge, so the thoughts began.............
  • It had to be very low cost.
  • It had to support a wide range of microcontrollers, especially those that were already "in education", as well as "proper" compilers for bare PIC's.
  • It had to remain "Arduino" shaped.
  • It had to be robust enough for tiny hands.
The XINO Basic appears adequate to the limited testing of prototype Amicus18 shields I plan.