Goodbye

[queenidog]

Thanks for all your replies. I wasn't going to come back but I was curious if anyone was agreeing with me...and some did.

I just bought 6 Arduino UNO boards for $12 (CAD) each, all taxes and shipping included. (They were shipped from Canada, but no doubt made in China). These are genuine UNO's made to the specification demanded by Arduino. As such it has a boot loader installed on it and it's just plug and play. I made an ultrasonic scanner using the inexpensive HC-SR04 and an UNO. How easy was it? In under 15 minutes I had one working, using the built in libraries and example code. then I started tweaking it with my limited knowledge of C++ at the time. How would this have been done with a PIC development system and PBP? I likely would have to write the code (with Arduino libraries it was very simple, like 5 lines of code), I would have to set the fuses and all that other overhead PICs require that Arduino takes care of. Once running, I would then have to make a board to have it standalone and I would have to provide an on-board power supply or converter. With the Arduino I downloaded the short program through USB, took the unit (with little breadboard on top) to another location, provided 12 volts from a Walwart and voila! There it goes. I added an I2C display later, again something that took very little time despite not using I2C before.

My current project uses 7-16 bit I2C expanders lighting 110 RGB LEDs. Each LED is addressable. Using the UNO there are only 5 wires interfacing to my project: 3 PWM DIO (so I can fade any light using PWM) for the RGB, and 2 wires for I2C, clock and data. I made a low power "model" that the UNO was quite capable of driving. I'm up to 16 pages of code to display the various patterns and have TONS of space left.

I've been using Arduino for over a year and have not had to update anything. It is very stable. When there is an update to a library, it's usually for more functionality (eg the Wire library for I2C and the Ultrasonic library for the SR04) than for bug fixes.

Having said that, the Arduino IDE is a bunch of crap! Little functionality. No debugger, I can't even PRINT my code. For that I have to cut and paste into Notepad++. The compiler is 10x SLOWER than the PBP compiler. THIS is why I was hoping I could use PBP, to eliminate those disadvantages. I'm sure Dave Taylor (MELabs) could have come up with something.

I've got 3 robots using Arduinos, and my desk has 3 Arduinos connected to 3 MORE projects. No more waiting for PCB to be made and discover the mistakes I made making them. Create something with Arduino and use the board in final stage.

The photo I attached shows a breadboard of the I2C interfaces for my display. The green board is one I had made. Yes, I had to make a board, but not the controller, seen at bottom right (Arduino UNO).

[Scampy]

I tried Amtel Studio 7 which is a very good alternative to the basic Arduino IDE, and offers a lot of extra tools.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I too made the switch because you can get up and running on the arduino platform very quickly and have something running using existing examples and library files. Once you have those examples running, it's normally an east task to modify the example to use it to perform the functions your want. As mentioned I wanted to use a TFT screen for the next version of my thermostat project that originated back in 2009 and was based on an 16F877 and 4 x 20 LCD (and I couldn't have done that without DT and Hentiks help). It would have been a lot of hard work and beyond my expertise to write the code in PB or ASM in order to get it to work, yet on the arduino it was displaying text in around 20 minutes of hooking the screen up and loading the example code. I then played with the commands to make the screen more relevant to the project, and then added an example code for reading an 18B20 sensor and displaying the temperature on the screen... by the end of the evening I had the time and temperature displayed on the screen along with a few additional variables... It makes it so easy to develop projects, but as mentioned, it's base around using these boards (uno, nano, mega etc) at the heart and stacking plug in modules (shields) into them. Where as programming PICs often results in a single custom designed PCB that the PIC plugs into.

It's really a shame that PBP didn't keep up with the pace and support more upto date hardware with standalone include files....

[queenidog]

You and I are on the same wavelength. I remember your name from previous posts I made when I was a PIC user.
I think MikroElektronika would be the way to go. They have the best development system ever made (I had one), with support for their Basic, C++, etc. They also have "modules" though not as extensive as Arduino chaps. I didn't like the Mikro because the Basic was too structured, yet I have to adhere to that structure with my Arduino C++ !! Who knew? Despite that, Arduino is still the better "system" for quick development. I too added LCDs to my repertoire and use the same codes in most of my software for troubleshooting. Also, since even the lowly UNO has dedicated lines for I2C (clock and data), I have now migrated to I2C capable LCDs. Only 4 wires (inc power and ground) required to the LCD now instead of that ribbon cable mess we are used to.

[khoog]

We use Arduino as a tool to quickly check out sensors and other components. It's great for making blinky lights, but it's terrible for learning embedded systems programming. All you're doing is running programs and libraries that someone else wrote, no one knows how they work, and it's almost impossible to track down all the nested routines and libraries that are called for even the simplest tasks.

We don't use PB very much anymore, but we invested in PB3 to help support the product and stay up to date. When we found that none of our existing programs would compile with it (getting error messages that said "unspecified error" didn't help) we decided it wasn't worth spending the time to get it all running. Our PIC development is now all done in C, and we dropped back to 6.1 for the quick test routines.

[Art]

Hmm.. how do you suppose any commercial product could have ever competed with free development environments and compilers?
From my point of view it was about time to quit developing PBP about the time Arduino became a thing,
not that I ever have, or ever will use one, so long as proper C platforms are also free.

I don’t think anyone is surprised. New generation controllers started arriving long ago, but without any support.
After ten years, and having to learn a new language anyway, you might as well adopt a real IDE & compiler for whatever mcu of choice.

PBP was never going to become an Arduino like platform because it’s an expensive commercial product,
but I wouldn’t even compare the two for what they are (or were) in their time.
The Arduino platform hides what you don’t need to know (which is actually what you do need to know), and shields serve to shield people from learning any electronics,
At the end of the day, many so called hobbyists get to plug one board into another, and get to say they made something.
That’s why Arduino represents the dilution of two hobbies to me.

The worst thing about PBP is the manual, which tells you how not to use it, and for me, the best thing was a good avenue to learning assembler,
for which, the last few remaining popular low resource controllers, are probably going to be the last reason to ever do so.

[Alberto]

Well boy, let me jump into this thread with my experience. As a pure hobbist, I moved to raspberry 3
And I have forgotten pbp3 and pics. Don't know why arduino never attracted me.
With raspberry and linux I had to learn python language, but now I am happy to have done it! The few project I have put together with this new hardware, are beyond anything I could ever dream last year using pics and pbp3. So, now and then I pop into the forum to see if something new happens but sadly I see less and less activity all the time. What a pity!

Alberto

[Ioannis]

Alberto,

not all tools are the solution to every problem. If you want just to write a few lines of code and run the code then OK. But you have a full featured computer to blink a led or do some other simple tasks.

Maybe I am seeing this from pure economic-technical aspect, but if one wants to do something in big scale, sure cannot rely on such platforms.

As already said, all these are very good to learn to walk. Then, if you feel ready, you have to run to compete others and these platforms (arduino, raspberry etc) are not the right shoes for it.

Ioannis