Development Boards: Which Looks Better to You?

[Analogue Robot]

Hello All.

I am thinking of getting a new development board with the capacity to deal with PICs with a pin count of up to 40. I'd also like it to be able to deal with other sizes of MCU (definitely 28-pin, possibly 20).

I've come across two boards which look particularly interesting:

i) The microEngineering Lab-X1

microEngineering Labs Online Store: LAB-X1 Experimenter Board (Assembled)

and

ii) The MikroElektronika EasyPIC6

EasyPIC6 Development System - PIC Development Board

- I'd appreciate your thoughts on these two, (or any others you might recommend), especially if you have personal experience of them; any pros and cons, anything you really like or dislike about them, reliability, flexibility etc.

I use MPLAB, write my code in assembly language, and blow my PICs with a PICSTART Plus. So far I have confined myself to the 16F819, but will be moving up to devices with more I/Os including the 16F887 soon.

- Thanks.

Analogue.

 

[SneaKSz]

Well maybe it's important to tell what your purposes are ?

Ive only worked with the easyPIC 4 , but the 6 seems pretty amazing !

 

[Wp100]

Hi,

Well the mELabs board seems very expensive considering it does not include a programmer.

The Mikro boards always look attractive but do you really need all those switches and leds.
More importantly those boards are not fully Mplab compatible - you cannot use MPlab debugger and its programmer must be run from Mikros software.

Would suggest you keep looking for a more suitable ready made board that is fully Mplab compatible and uses a Pickit2 or Pickit3 programmer - have you searched though Microchips offerings.

At the end of the day a dev board is just a collection of leds, switches a lcd display and some sockets - you could buy a good programmer like the Pickit2 and build your own dev board - then in the future is easy to upgrade it to how you need it.

You might only be using the 16F chios at the moment but you might soon find you are using other chips like the 18F and 24Fs etc.

 

[3v0]

Modern PICs are standalone computers. In the past you needed a lot support chips just to run the processor and add a bit of IO. Now it is all on the PIC chip.

If a development board has all or most of the features you need over and above that provided by the PIC itself, then it is a good fit.

I either build the circuit on a solder breadboard or go right to schematic layout in eagle and make a PCB for the first prototype.

 

[Analogue Robot]

@ All - Thanks for your responses: certainly food for thought.

@ SneaKSz: Purposes are general experimentation and learning; there's not any particular area of PIC programming I am focusing on heavily right now as I consider myself to be a virtual beginner.

@ Wp100: I have had a look at Microchip's boards but nothing really caught my eye: they seemed to be specific to various areas, while what I'm looking for should really be of a more general purpose nature. Or maybe I've not seen the full range of their products - I found their site a bit difficult to navigate.

It's a pity that the MikroElektronika board demands that we use their software: it looks like the sort of thing I could "grow" into; but, as you said, it's not fully MPLAB compatible.

A home-made board is starting to sound like the most viable option...

@ 3v0: I'd really like a board which allows me to chop and change to a considerable degree, given my PIC-novice status and the fact that I seem to learn best by tinkering with things.

- Analogue.

 

[Jon Chandler]

For my own use, I take a different approach. I like a cheap board without all kinds of extra stuff on it, but with a few essential programming features and reliable connectors for interfacing to sensors, other boards and the real-world. The TAP-28 is my design for 28 pin PIC18F-series parts.

**broken link removed**

I'm making the bare boards available at a reasonable cost, and in fact I'll supply the Gerber files after the next run of boards is proven out. For small quantities of boards, it's not easy to get the boards built at a lower cost. More information can be found at the web site:

ThrowAwayPIC