Hello, dear PIC friends!
My question is quite common, so I shy to post it again. However, due to my bad English or maybe because a topic is so general and wide, I could not find comprehensive answers yet. As most of you I began with 12x devices then moved to 16f84, then to 16f877 and finally to 18F family. Now, I want to build real industrial application with touch screen and graphic display, peripheral devices and sensors connected by CAN or RS485 bus and Ethernet controller. Obviously, such project exceeds capabilities of single 18F microcontroller. So, I have a few options:
1) Switch to PIC 24 or PIC32 family which currently not supported by PICBasic Pro compiler.
2) Investigate others controllers and compilers which mostly use C++ ,C# and Microsoft .NET framework.
3) Try to stack a few PIC 18X as master and slaves controllers to complete the job.
All these options look challenge to me. My knowledge of Assembler not allows programming PIC24 or PIC32 directly. Microsoft .NET is complex and required huge time investment; moreover all those Motorola/Freescale microcontrollers have manuals over 1000 pages, and due to my English such reading my takes some time. Stacking PICs is easy solution, but unfortunately preserve the problem as it not allows to investigate other microcontrollers and generally move forward.
So, my question: are there any possibilities to soft and gradual transition from PIC18 family to other microcontrollers? (Without chances to became fulltime student). Are any chances to build such system by using single PIC18XX and peripheral boards? ( such, applications normally employ advanced PLC or industrial computer)
Maybe someone already built something similar or at least knows how connect all these worlds.
Any input welcome!
Vladimir