Guide in choosing good overall PIC dev board

[sghosh]

Our department getting grant to buy development board and I do not want them to buy same old FPGA board which we have 100 of and only 10 uses so far.

Need your enourmous experiences in helping make good choice of development boards.

Friends with me interested in learning following PIC parts:

PIC18F4550
PIC18F46J50
PIC18F46J53
PIC18F47J53
PIC24FJ256DA206
PIC24FJ256GB106
PIC24FJ256GB210

In time we will also be interesting in dsPIC and PIC32 but all these right now together too much load, so beginnning only above.

I see **broken link removed**

Of all this the Explorer 16 100-pin board is interesting.

At $130 **broken link removed** has the nice option of interchangeable Plug-In Modules.

I assuming this means we can make our own boards with the above PICs also and just pluggin them as Plug-In Modules?

Also finding the following boards, but confused if it possible to replace the PIC already present on the board?

$65 **broken link removed**

$60 MPLAB Starter Kit for PIC24H

$60 MPLAB Starter Kit for PIC24F


Development board from Microchip is recommended as easy to make dean agree, budget of around $200 or less per board

 

[Brevor]

I have never used one but I have heard good things about the EasyPic and BigPic boards from MikroElectronika.