getting more hacked off with microship.

[Simon]

can someone explain to me what exact type of asshole writes microchip documentation ? I have the user guide 51288 for C18 (or whatever of the damn many C's microchip have bought up and banged into their portfolio)and it says I should read DS51295, can I find the damn thing ? NO ! every time I find "it" I find it is actually the original document that said I should use the other one. What sort of fuckwits run microchip ? Maybe I should jump chip. Is it too much to damn well ask to be able to have ONE program to do the job and not half a dozen pieces and ONE efing manual and not half a dozen only to find they are all the same one. Is microchip C some kind of sick joke or what ? Every time I try to approach C on micro-controllers I just find a sea of pieces I have to put together just to get a working environment while having to learn to program a PC in order to program a uC it's looking like so much damn effort I really can't be asked ! No wonder the arduino is so popular !

END on rant !

[PeterG]

can someone explain to me what exact type of asshole writes microchip documentation ? I have the user guide 51288 for C18 (or whatever of the damn many C's microchip have bought up and banged into their portfolio)and it says I should read DS51295, can I find the damn thing ? NO ! every time I find "it" I find it is actually the original document that said I should use the other one. What sort of fuckwits run microchip ? Maybe I should jump chip. Is it too much to damn well ask to be able to have ONE program to do the job and not half a dozen pieces and ONE efing manual and not half a dozen only to find they are all the same one. Is microchip C some kind of sick joke or what ? Every time I try to approach C on micro-controllers I just find a sea of pieces I have to put together just to get a working environment while having to learn to program a PC in order to program a uC it's looking like so much damn effort I really can't be asked ! No wonder the arduino is so popular !

END on rant !

Now thats got to feel better........

[Simon]

yea it does ! 

[AndyC_772]

Have you downloaded and installed MPLAB X? The installer is much better than the old MPLAB 8 one, just tick the box for the XC8 compiler (the current latest-and-greatest compiler which supersedes C18).

[Simon]

I'll go look for maplabx then, yet another option. All i want is to have a reasonably friendly environment to write a C program in, not to have to work how the environment works because I don't have time for that, I'm supposed to be writing C not fixing up software to get it to work as promised.

[ElektroQuark]

First link in Google searching for DS51295:

http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=2123&param=en024286

[Simon]

I'll have a look when I'm home. Thing is I found "links" for it all over the place, but when I open it it is the document i was originally reading and the name is a different number.

[djsb]

We use CCS PCM at work alongside MPLAB under Win7. It's used in a class of between 15-30 students in a 3 hour class once a week. It works well and the only annoyance so far is having to copy the device header into the project directory. This is mainly because of the university IT system and shouldn't be a problem for a single PC.

We are migrating to MPLABX next year.

David.

[ptricks]

LOL. Sorry had to laugh because I know what you mean. Some of the earlier data sheets were easier to understand. The trend now is to make one data sheet for 10 devices and then tell you along the way, note2, does not apply to chipxxxxx. which makes it really confusing.  Don't look at the pic32 data sheets unless you want to really lose it, probably the most confusing I have seen in a long time.  Not only is each topic only briefly mentioned requiring you to download something else, but they put the 30+ different categories in separate downloads ! No one file download .

If you want to see a data sheet done right look up the pic 16f1823 . The data sheet for that chip impressed me enough that I had to email them and thank the person who wrote it for a job well done.  Code examples for everything, detailed explanations, no referring you to another download.

[Simon]

the problem is that stuff is strictly categorized so you end up with related register setting at opposite ends of the datasheet

[hans]

I think MPLABX is a major improvement. It may be a bit confusing they have now 2 IDE's, but I believe the original MPLAB is being phased out. The UI on that is horrible though. On the other side.. MPLABX feels kinda slow on my laptop (4 year old machine, Java EATS RAM modules for breakfast). But it feels a lot more solid and with a more 'permanent' layout of panes etc., but at the places where I expect them to be.
I haven't had much IDE problems when programming in C. MPLABX now has a functional wizard for a new project, so you can choose your project name, debugger, compiler and done. I usually google a main.c with standard fuse settings and get a blinky running. Usually takes 10-20 minutes in total.

I wonder what you're struggling with to get working, why did you need this datasheet?

If I program my PIC controllers, the only datasheet I need is for the microcontroller itself (have to confess I mainly use PIC24, DSPIC33 and PIC32), and it's chapter parts (PIC18 series don't do this yet?).
Similarly though ARM chips often have a datasheet and user manual, which in the beginning was confusing for me too ("Where are the registers on this ARM7?!"). Later I figured it out, and was pretty easy.

I have to also confess the datasheets involves a ton of scrolling. In the end you really need the peripheral chapter document to get an accurate description of the registers. Although, PIC18 doesn't seem to feature that (yet?).
For PIC24/32 it's cross jumping documents indeed, but today's PDF readers come with tabs too so I don't feel it's much of a struggle.
What I otherwise sometimes do is open the datasheet multiple times. Just have to remember which was which piece of the overstructorized document.