Pic16 vs Pic18 vs AVR, Picbasic Vs Proteus Vs ASM Vs Hitech C Vs MPlabs c18

[toalan]

I stumbled on a Link to a Microchip document titled something like "The Truth", it was a comparision between the PIC and the AVR. I did not read much of it but basically it showed that PICs were competitive with AVRs. It was a document written in 1997. I lost the link.

[toalan]

Learning AVR is such a B*tch, It seems that Atmel is releasing MCUs well before they have fully debugged their software and programmers. I am learning the atmega48, the atmel programmer I bought for it was not able to correctly program the atmega48 at all, i just downloaded a firmware upgrade and now finnaly I can get ISP programming for the atmega48 to work, but high speed parallel programming still will not work. Even in the release notes they did not mentioin ISP fixes for the atmega48, but atleast I can program it now.

I have been working for the past 5 days on coding PWM and again it seems that the atmel software does not correctly support atmega48 correctly, this time it is with PWM.

I just downloaded an upgrade to the atmel software suite and I am not holding my breath that PWM will work with atmeg48 this time around.

Atmel datasheets are just bad, they go into a bit more detail than PIC datasheets, but they are so long winded in the datasheets, they mention the same things over and over again.

PIC really does seem alot more well supported, and well organized; both development tools wise and datasheet wise. But the Atmel just offers so much more peripherial options for the same price as the PIC, for instance the atmega48 has, 6 PWM outputs and you can configure different frequencies for each PWM unit, that is crazy.

[mister_e]

probably this is why Microchip made DsPIC too. You should have a look on those. i actually play with a dsPIC30F6010 just for fun and learning.

[Luciano]

AVR info and forum:

http://www.avrfreaks.net

[toalan]

too much experimenting for me with different MCUs, time for me to do some work. Thanks Luc for pointing me to DSPic, I will look into them once I get frustrated enough with AVR.

[toalan]

Update:

I started to use IAR embedded workbench a month ago and everything is super fast without many glitches. The same program written in MC18 ported over to atmel using IAR embedded workbench is, I would say based on my experience, about 50% faster.

IAR is really good stuff, tougher to digest than most languages, I would say it is onpar with HiTech C. Documentation is not all that good, but the language is solid and there are many optimization options which really makes things faster and smaller.

My fav language is still MPLAB's MC18 but IAR is not too far behind it. PICBasic is still the easiest language I ever used though, with Proton in a close second.

I still do use PicBasic once in a while to do smaller projects as coding for it is easy and the software USART not needing a MAX232 chip is just utter brilliance.