help!?!?

I like the mikroelektronika (www.http://www.mikroe.com/) products. Among other things, they offer a C compiler for PIC that is free for programs up to 2K (which is a lot).

Good luck and welcome

Cheers

Padu

You need a C compiler. :)

The FIRST robotics systems use the MPLAB IDE along with the MPLAB C18 C compiler. They normally program the systems in C I believe (if you do any programming at all). I just installed a version yesterday for use with the Radio Shack VEX robotics system which I bought off the ifirobotics.com web site for $50 (C-BOT-COMPILER).

I believe the full IDE and C18 compiler from microchip costs more like $500 but works with their entire chip set instead of being limited to only working with the one(s)? used by First/VEX. I don't know exactly what you would need to buy to add to what you already have, but I assume if you talked to Microchip they could tell you.

I also get the impression that the MPLAB IDE is designed to work with multiple compilers and languages so you probably have multiple options on which compiler you can use.

Have a read of:

should help.

Don...

Not a PIC issue, but...

Not (yet) for their AVR compiler, unfortunately. It's a newer product, and not yet optimized, but it's quite easy to go over the 2K limit with something like the LCD library and 20 lines of code. This at least on the Basic front, but their C compiler is along similar development timelines, so I assume something similar.

For now, I use the ME AVR board, which is superior to anything else I have, even the STK500, but continue to use Bascom AVR.

-- Gordon

Step 1: Purchase, or download in electronic form, the entire published works of Donatien Aldonse Francois, le Marquis de Sade.

Step 2: Read and enjoy.

Step 3: Once you are comfortable with everything in these texts, you are ready for a HLL on a PIC.

To quote from the Wikipedia entry on the Marquis de Sade: "Many of Sade's works contain explicit and often repetitive descriptions of rape and countless sexual perversions, often involving violence and transcending the boundaries of the possible. Sade's libertines founded their philosophy on a purposeful flouting of moral norms and a hatred of religious ethics. In nature, they say, the strong win and the weak lose; therefore all laws and ethics, designed as they are to protect the weak, are seen as unnatural."

This is an approximate description of C or - God! - C++ on a PICmicro. The architecture is inherently unfriendly to HLLs and programming them in C/C++ is highly inefficient. If you are using C as your primary programming language, there are much better choices such as the AVR or MSP430.

For more information read:

You can also check the Simple Device C Compiler (SDCC) compiler. It comes with two ports, one for the 12-bit PIC cores and one for the

16-bit cores.

Check the website:

You can also subscribe to the SDCC user list:

regards, Vangelis Rokas