EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
EEVblog => News/Suggestions/Help => Topic started by: SgtTech on April 19, 2018, 10:19:46 am
-
Hi Dave,
How about doing a review of the Microchip development kits range? You could include a review of the new Pickit4, various development boards they sell and their cloud based development environment. You could maybe do a basic microcontroller tutorial using their kit.
These kits look good to me as a novice but which one do i choose and for what. I think if you know what you are trying to do its is easier but which kit would you recommend for people just learning and experimenting without a specific project in mind?
Maybe Microchip would stump up for a few give away kits or discount codes that you could run a competition on.
Ian
-
It kinda beats me why would anyone want to use a PIC. ARMs are more cost effective and have much better development tools and know-how on the Internet. dsPICs are a sad joke when compared to Cortex-M7s or C2000 from TI (as much as I hate the latter ones, they do pack some serious punch).
PIC24s and dsPICs still have at best 2 clocks per instruction while ARMs often average >1.5 instruction per clock (M7's even >2). They are littered with bugs and current devtools just plain suck (they had it right in the past, Pickit2 + MPLAB v8.xx dev setups were really fast and stable and they had all the functionality required).
Microchip is good, but for cheap, simple and available analog and power stuff and those things I actually use a lot. They have no idea how to make a good uC nowadays though.
</rant>
-
Well, for starters, the documentation is good. The peripherals are good. The DMA controller is very flexible. Big FIFO's for SPI and UART, etc. etc.
For example, Microchips' SPI peripherals have the option to delay the input data sampling.
When acting as a master, it solves the problem of the long propagation delay in digital isolators when dealing with ADC's at high bit rates.
It avoids the use of two SPI-interfaces (clock loop-back method): http://www.electronicdesign.com/microcontrollers/isolate-your-high-speed-spi-bus-despite-long-propagation-delays (http://www.electronicdesign.com/microcontrollers/isolate-your-high-speed-spi-bus-despite-long-propagation-delays)
Are there ARM MCU's that have the same option?
-
Mike will do a good review of the pickit4 soon enough.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcs0ZkP_as4PpHDhFcmCHyA (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcs0ZkP_as4PpHDhFcmCHyA)
-
It kinda beats me why would anyone want to use a PIC. ARMs are more cost effective and have much better development tools and know-how on the Internet. dsPICs are a sad joke when compared to Cortex-M7s or C2000 from TI (as much as I hate the latter ones, they do pack some serious punch).
PIC24s and dsPICs still have at best 2 clocks per instruction while ARMs often average >1.5 instruction per clock (M7's even >2). They are littered with bugs and current devtools just plain suck (they had it right in the past, Pickit2 + MPLAB v8.xx dev setups were really fast and stable and they had all the functionality required).
Microchip is good, but for cheap, simple and available analog and power stuff and those things I actually use a lot. They have no idea how to make a good uC nowadays though.
</rant>
:-DD
sorry i won't bite