evandude
New Member
If I was starting from scratch I am not so sure which I'd choose. I chose PICs long ago because it's what people around me used, primarily, and I had hardly heard of AVR's. Today, I am constantly seeing all sorts of great projects built with AVR's, and it seems like they've got a huge user base (like avrfreaks.net)
It almost seems like PICs are the "old fashioned" choice now, and that AVR's are exploding in popularity, particularly with newcomers - they seem like the new-age choice, as evidenced by the better open-source and linux support they seem to have.
I don't see PICs really gaining any new ground lately... Getting set up with a PIC programmer seems to be a huge problem for new people. The cheap JDM serial ones are finicky, newer computers don't always have parallel ports, and they can get pretty expensive when you start looking at USB programmers. I finally built myself a USB ICD2 clone but I certainly went through a bunch of programmers that gave me lots of problems before that...
Again, take this all with a grain of salt, I've got no real experience with AVR's, just PICs, but just know that I'm certainly no AVR evangelist (nor PIC evangelist, for that matter)
It almost seems like PICs are the "old fashioned" choice now, and that AVR's are exploding in popularity, particularly with newcomers - they seem like the new-age choice, as evidenced by the better open-source and linux support they seem to have.
I don't see PICs really gaining any new ground lately... Getting set up with a PIC programmer seems to be a huge problem for new people. The cheap JDM serial ones are finicky, newer computers don't always have parallel ports, and they can get pretty expensive when you start looking at USB programmers. I finally built myself a USB ICD2 clone but I certainly went through a bunch of programmers that gave me lots of problems before that...
Again, take this all with a grain of salt, I've got no real experience with AVR's, just PICs, but just know that I'm certainly no AVR evangelist (nor PIC evangelist, for that matter)