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Comment by Zardoz84 | Hacker News Reader

I think that this just killed the one of the triumph card of PIC micro-controllers.

Seriously, Microchip uC have now any interesting thing apart of a lot of embed I/O hardware inside ? ARM based uCs now are cheap, low powered and have far better IDEs and compilers...

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The strongest selling point for PIC is always the quality of the I/O hardware and the attention to the low-volume market. The CPU core is just something that you need to deal with. ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets.

Lead time is always an important parameter to consider when choosing a new MCU for a low-volume project :-)

I used to start new projects looking on digikey website more than anything.

>> ATMEL is always great presenting fabulous MCU than sometimes takes forever to reach the low-volume markets.

But in the low-volume markets what wins is usually better software support, and with it's mbed-os(and other software frameworks availble for ARM mcu's), ARM is surely to win here.

Well...

PIC is weird. But it does the job and as the other comment said, they had a lot of models with a lot of devices (ADC, DAC, USB, fully configurable ports, etc).

Also cheap and available in "hobbyist" form factors (DIP)

Yes, you would either go to Assembly (which is harder to use than "tradicional uCs" - like 8051 family, Z80, etc), C compilers (some limited), or there was even PIC basic, heh

ARM? Write in C, "fire and forget" unless you are doing something more complicated (like audio synth - yes, I did this)

I quite liked PIC stuff for the hardware USB support, which I used with a PIC32 DIP chip. They also have a gcc port for their architectures now, which is quite nice xc8,16,32. Although apparently the 'free' version of it, doesn't provide all optimizations annoyingly.

I'm starting to use ARM dev boards now, because of things like the MHz and the nice compilers available.

Yeah, it's hard to justify when PIC has bytes of RAM and ARM has kB of RAM...

PIC32 is MIPS. The older, smaller PICs are quite different -- also from each other.

I actually refuse to use PIC32 on principle because they took the MIPS version of gcc, added a license manager to it that disabled -O2 and higher unless you paid them a substantial sum of money for a license key, and then tried to make people use their crippled gcc by forbidding people from using the official PIC32 peripheral libraries with any other version of the compiler. It was a really sleazy end-run around the intent of the GPL.

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