[sdiy] Microcontrollers, development environments and hardware programmer recommendations.

[Tom Wiltshire]

On 22 Oct 2016, at 13:54, Ben Riggs <benalog1977 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It’s been at least a 10 year hiatus in which i’ve given away/lost my hardware/software capability to program micro controllers, of which i’m sure are redundant anyways. but now i’ve got some project ideas that i would like to implement and i’m not sure how to go about getting the capability back. In the past i used PIC12 PIC16 & PIC18 micro controllers, so it would be handy to stick with the PIC platform because thats where i’m experienced, but i’m open to other platform recommendations if more suitable.
> 
> I started to look but became quickly overwhelmed.
> 
> what I’m looking for as far as recommendations go is based on:
> 1. I travel a lot (8 months of the year living out of a suitcase/ working out of a pelican toolbox) and travel with a current model MacBook (with the single USB-C port). I noticed that MPLAB IDE X runs on mac which is good. what other development environments do?

MPLAB X on your Macbook on is fine. I use it. Haven't tried others.

> 2. a hardware programmer, portability is key. USB and port powered preferable.

PICKit3 is cheap ($40 or so) and does the job. With this programmer, power is not supplied by the programmer, so the chip has to be powered, or you need to be programming a chip in a prototype circuit or on a breadboard.
I've had a "mobile firmware coding" set-up which consists of a PC netbook, PICKit3, 5V power supply, and a prototype on stripboard. It can be pretty simple. 

> 3. are PICs old tech now? is it better to move on and learn something new? what are the options?

There's been a recent upgrade of the PIC 12F/16F series which has improved things considerably. They added a second indirection pointer (very handy) and some missing instructions (add with carry - ouch!) which has made the chips easier to use and quite a bit faster. I'm not fully conversant with the detail of other manufacturer's offerings, but they seem perfectly serviceable to me.

If you've used PICs in the past, you'll easily find your way back into the newer chips.

Although I think there is still a role for these simpler chips, in some ways I think that if you're moving back into micro controllers, you should just go straight in with something more powerful and give yourself more options. STM32F4 series seem to be the chips of choice. This is a jump I haven't made, because I still keep finding more things to do with simpler chips. YMMV.

Tom