[sdiy] Pic grogramming for dummies

[Brock Russell]

At 06:59 PM 16/02/04 -0700, Ian Fritz wrote:
>My recommendation is to just use the Microchip documentation.  It is very 
>clearly and carefully written.

Since I have just spent the past 2 1/2 days working on PIC related problems 
I found this comment rather amusing and thought I should refute it with an 
amazing example of Microchip incompetence. I realize getting documentation 
correct can be a difficult task but I have found Microchip to be the worst 
for distributing datasheets and app notes with errors.

My all time favorite is their I2C tutorial which they seem to have finally 
hidden on their site, although it is still there at 
<http://www.microchip.com/download/lit/suppdoc/toots/i2c.pdf>.
Not only do they offer an extremely poor example of how to implement I2C 
but they include errors such as getting the STOP condition wrong. Best yet, 
they show that it is wrong with a scope shot supposedly showing "NACK and 
STOP at End of Transfer" on page 87. I'm still waiting for that scope to 
show me a STOP condition.

Now, I always assume Microchip got it wrong and test and qualify everything 
when I use their parts and I never use their code. Actually I do this with 
every company now because others have problems too. I've been burned by 
Motorola the worst, and had problems with documentation from almost every 
company I have used parts from.
And yes, even the datasheets and manuals I write sometimes contain errors I 
introduced - but I blame it on marketing whenever I can.

Brock - looking forward to doing some FPGA synth DIY this weekend - oh, I 
forgot to mention all those Xilinx documentation errors...