Out of the blue I receive a notification to this thread, I totally forgot I had still set alerts to this board. Its a shame to see so many of the old members departing (by that I mean long serving rather than age ). But I personally feel that PBBpro missed the boat long ago, and as such people have had no choice but to migrate over to other platforms, be that MikroBASIC, or C, or moving away from PICs altogether and opting for an AVR based platforms in order to keep up with technology.

Some of you may remember (around 10 years ago) that with the help of Darrel (god rest his soul) and Henrik I developed a multi-channel thermostat for my reptiles using PID routines. A few years later I wanted to take it further and use cheap colour TFT screens, and give it more functionality, but to do so with PBP would be hard as there was no native support... PBP only supported 4 x 20 LCDs at the time, and even GLCD's were difficult unless you used 3rd party serial devices between the PIC and the screen, but then it was still mono and limited in fonts and styles.

I migrated over to Arduino for my hobby projects, and soon had a version of the above project ported to an Adriuno mega, using a 320 x 240 TFT with "official" library file (like and include file) that had simple commands like tft.print to write to the screen. Granted my code was clunky and didn't follow traditional C styling, but it worked. I was recently mentored by a chap on the other side of the world who took my code and mentored me whilst we completely re-wrote the code, steering me away form the normal BASIC structure I was still used to. The bottom line is that I have now taken the project to the next level. Its more compact, efficient, and now does 8 channels simultaneously on a device that is running at less than half the clock speed of the PIC I used to use.

If PBP had been developed (either by the owners, contracted Mel, Darrel and others, or went open sourced) to keep pace with technology (I mentioned TFT's but other devices like Ethernet, WiFi, and a host of sensors like GPS, pressure and altitude were lacking) then I probably would have stayed with PBP. I do miss the way the forum functioned, and mostly everyone would fall over backwards to help even with the most basic of issues, but then if the product doesn't keep pace then there is nothing to keep them here.

Art mate, sorry to see you go... good luck in whatever platform you have chosen