Quote Originally Posted by selbstdual View Post
Yes. There are compareable products, which have the same processing power but are not used by hobbyists. I think it is a curse for b2b if your products are mainly used by hobbyists. Well, hobbyist does not need to be equal to producing amateurish products, but this is how it is perceived often.
PICs are used by hobbyists because they are easy to use and the development tools are cheap. That doesnt mean that PICs arent used in commercial products. I have a couple of Kenwood 5" TFT Monitors and the controlling chip is a PIC.

Yes a lot of hobbyists use PICs and between them probably buy thousands of devices per year but someone like Melanie buys thousands of devices for a single product their company produces.

I have over a thousand items out there containing PICs and in over 5 years there hasnt beeen a single failure caused by a PIC or the software.

I am talking about professional people in the working areas being mentioned (mainly security). Imagine a power plant where the brown out bit is set in a pic and the pic suddenly stops working.
That comment is fatally flawed. Many microcontrollers have brownout detection etc. How the microcontroller is programmed and how the hardware/software responds to brownouts etc is down to the skills of the designer.


I have never seen an amateur designing an ipod like device. Especially concerning the thickness.
Hmmmm.... at least one member of this list has designed an MP3 player using a PIC. True, it is probably larger than an iPod but then the first generation iPods were considerably larger than current models. Its also a fair bet that the proof of concept design wasnt all that small. Given the facilities to produce the required hardware there is no reason why an "amateur" couldnt create such a design but the tools, facilities and finance required are beyond their means.

The whole Amateur/Professional division is a difficult line to draw.

The word professional can be used to indicate someone with formal qualifications, someone who is paid for doing a particular task, or can be used to indicate the finished look of a product.

An amateur may earn a few beer tokens for their hobby in which case they could be classed as semi-professional, they could have far greater knowledge than someone with formal qualifications but just dont have that "bit of paper" and they can (and often do) produce work to a very high standard.

Getting back the the thread title, my opinion is that the PIC is both Playground AND Serious Microcontroller.

Serious Microcontroller because millions of electronic items contain PICs and Playground because it is an affordable way for hobbyists to get into Microcontrollers.