PICs - Playground or 'serious' microcontroller

[Luciano]

Hi,

The ability to match processing power to the application is an
important consideration when designers select a microcontroller.

For a mass production, the goal is to have adequate processing
power at the lowest possible price.

What kind of applications do you have in mind?


Best regards,

Luciano

[skimask]

Not that it makes a difference in the whole amateur vs. professional arena...but...

I work in a shop where we fix 'obsolete', no longer procurable items.
I'll pull apart a lot of items on a daily basis to see what's what...and if it's fixable or not...
There are a lot of PIC's out there. A lot of the PIC16Cxx types are in quite a few household appliances, washers, dryers, microwaves, etc. (generally these items are too old to have flash PICs in them). I taken a number of the PICs to my house to check them out. Read out the old code (you'd be surprised how many of the older PICs are code protected!!!), burn some new code to try out the pin drivers, reburn the old code). I haven't found one yet that had failed, 99.9% of the time, it's something else (i.e. motor, gear train, valve, etc).
Of course this is just off the top of my head. I've seen PICs in numerous other places. And I will say that it appears that the PICs major role in these items is as reprogrammable glue logic, which is exactly what PICs 'back in the day' were made for, take up a load of discrete logic chips, pack them into one chip.
And again, all name brand stuff.
And that's the beauty of a PIC......good enough for the pro's, simple enough for the schmo's....
(and I keep going back to post #2, something about a pic in the box in the box...)