Regarding the comments about having a full featured single board computer to blink LEDs, but that I'm sorry to say is what people want these days. The days where programming a PIC and then using strip board to build a project with supporting timing xtal and associate discrete components has sadly passed. I'm talking about the hobbyist hear, where often than not all they want to do is plug in board X to board Y and load up a sample script and then let it do its thing. For me the Arduino language was very alien after BASIC but I picked it up by cutting and pasting bits of sample code for each device (RTC, TFT, DHT11 etc) to make up the full code for my project, and learnt by debugging the code. It was quick (compared to attempting the same - if at all possible - with PBP) and cheap. But then where plug in boards are concered, MikroElectronika did that decades ago with their EasyXXX development boards, perfecting it with the latest versions where the small modules plug directly into the development board.

The problem is as others have said, PBP has been left behind. I visit this forum daily and sometimes it's weeks between posts in the PBP section. 5,6,8 years back it was sometimes hard to keep up with the posts on all the topics there was that may members contributing. Someone said that what do people expect, PBP is a commercial product and can't compete with an open source platform such as the Arduino, but then again MikroElectronika is also a commercially based product, but they appear to have kept their hardware and software up to date and cater for modern devices as the hardware came out (TFT's for example where simple include files do the basics, or you can use a GUI interface tool to produce the code). I don't know how MikroElectronica compare to MelLabs in terms of size, (Is it just Lester or is/was there a team behind it), but they seem to be the goto platform for the hobbyist who still wants to program in BASIC.


It is a shame really.... but PBP ha shad its day IMO