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pic or atmel??

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gregoost

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Hi Im going to start a robot project and can I know what is best for it, atmel AVR or PIC????..I have no experience with atmel so I don't know what is best for these kind of projects?Can anyone help????
 
Ask you friends and neighbors what they use. That way you have support from people you know. This is the best thing to do.

If you dont know anyone locally that is into uC's then flip a coin.

They will both do what you want, and they both have great on-line resources.

Pics have better (and funnier) support from the manufacturer.
 
As a hobbyist you should take a look at the available development tools more than the individual chips.

I think Atmel provides better (free) development software. And Teensy USB Development Board is a good product for a hobbyist who doesn't want to invest much money in a programmer. There are probably similar products for PICs.. hopefully somebody can point them out for you.

If you're already familiar with PICs, then the only major reason to go with Atmel is to learn a new family of microcontrollers. The XMega is a very interesting and powerful new microcontroller family from Atmel.
 
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People like A or B for a lot of different reasons.

I am sure the Atmel crowd will correct me if I am wrong but I think Microchip offers a wider choice of processors and peripherals.

Microchip has (or will soon have) free versions of all its compilers. You can pay and get support and better optimization. There are two levels past free. Each shrinks the code by 15%. I the 24 and 32 bit compilers are gcc based. But less optimized code is not a problem esp for the hobby type. There is plenty speed and memory at reasonable cost.

Microchip offers a single programmer with in circuit debuggers for under $50 that will program all the 8 16 and 32 bit PICs.

Microchip offers two IDE's. MPLAB 8 the current production IDE with simulator. MPLAB X now in public beta is based on netbeans and has most if not all the bells and whistles associated with modern IDE's. More geared for the software type. Even better it is open source and you can launch any compiler from it.

Having said that I am vendor neutral.

In my book the people who can help you get up to speed are more important then who made the chip.
 
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hmmm..I think I'd go for pic as Im quite familier with it..thanx everyone...does anyone know abt a good robotic (pic) developement board????by 'good' I mean easy to use, smaller etc. thanx again everyone..
 
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