Actually we have a lot of Chinese partners who are diligent, hard-working and produce quality product at sensible prices – something a lot of folks in the USA and Europe seem to have lost touch with. You will get product piracy in any country – not just China.
Well put Melanie
Try reading the tread and looking at the board. To be a thief you have to steal something, and this board has enough differences that its obvious that they didn't steal it from the makers of the EasyPIC boards. If you search the net you will see that the market for this sort of product is dominated by the boards offered by MikroElektronika, so maybe the Chinese feel that there should be more competition and developed their own "version" of a development board ?
I also recal that the schematic for the easyPIC3 was available from their website as a PDF at one point, so even if this board from China is based on the same design, you can't accuse them of stealing the design as it was in the public domain anyway !
Well I've bit the bullet and placed my order for a development board...
I opted for an EasyPIC5 board (plus a few extras), which was ordered direct from the manufactures website (the strong pound ment that it was actually cheaper than purchasing from a UK supplier !).
The main reason I opted for the EasyPIC5 board over the one on e-bay was mainly down to support. I Know that if I have any issues with the board, software etc that no only is there a good forum, the company seem to be very responsive. I found very little on the net regarding the e-bay offering and whilst it offred very good value for money, just didn't feel confident enough ordering from e-bay.
Whilst the e-bay offering had some very useful features, which the EasyPIC5 is lacking, it didn't have some of the features we all tend to talk about on this forum such as USB interfacing.
I'm now lookingn forward to learning more with this development board, but I'll still be using PBP and will not be moving to Mikrobasic![]()
Must of entered the wrong seach string... found a PDF of the manual plus quite a few otherh hits !
http://www.pic16.com/soft/QL200_user_a4_en.pdf
I'm still wondering that same thing myself...almost out of horsepower/memory on the 18F series on a couple of projects and am wanting to partially move over to dsPICs/mikroBasic, obviously keeping PBP for the 8-bit micro's. Still can't decide whether or not to spend the $$$.
I troll the forums over at mikro-e, and they seem a bit less active than here.
No "advantage" what so ever. Just that the manufactures site also offer several options for software, one of which is mikrobasic, which is included as a bundled item. For a Novice experimenter / builder both languages work fine, but for me I find PBP more logical in its syntax.
I'm sure others who are more experienced here will soon say one has better functionality for X, Y or Z. But then each to their own opinion, and whilst you will get lots of pro PBP support here, if you asked the same question on the microbasic forum it the be biased the other way![]()
Well, PBP is BS2 compatible; I don't know if MikroBasic is or not. The forum here is more active. If you really want to shop around, also view Proton+ Basic. It includes a simulator, which might help. It is 99% BS2 compatible, but has a much broader command base. They also have an active forum.
One nice thing, if you are in the States, I've called MELabs a few times and had an answer within seconds, rather than waiting for a forum response.
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