They are the serial ones... According to the news.... People are dropping contraband into prisons using quadcopters and a smartphone... Like I said... You can do tons with them
Hi Ian,
It's funny how resourceful some people are
I checked on the Pinguino a little bit. It looks like they are sold in the Netherlands. It also looks like everything they offer now is in kit form, so the board that looked good to me has to be assembled. Not too much to it though (that one with the board just a tiny bit bigger than the chip).
I think this is a great idea, but i would like to see a wider chip type support. For example, the little 12F675 which i've used over and over again.
What i have been using since i first started with these chips is either ASM or a language i had made up myself to help program chips like that. The language is similar to C almost like the Arduino, but keep low level enough to allow the user (me) to easily keep track of the way the machine (the PIC chip) is handling the instructions (such as clock cycles), and above all, not waste any machine cycles (for example the Arduino digitalWrite function takes many instructions cycles just to set or reset one chip pin).
What i didnt realize until reading about the Pinguino and the history of the Arduino was that this language might be attractive to other PIC users, and of course it is always expandable.
I am going to have to give this some more thought. If someone could pick up a PIC chip and start programming in minutes (like with the Arduino) instead of hours i think they would like using PIC more.
One thing the Arduino IDE has though is a lot of support files for various common tasks, like driving an LED display, LCD display, etc., as well as a lot of support hardware (Shields). It would take some time to get that far with it.
Probably require a team of dedicated PIC users hint hint
You know what would be really nice, if the Arduino IDE could be used to program PIC chips. All that would be required (for basic operation that is) is to use a different set of files for the different devices i think.