During this UK summer vacation we will be (as usual) upgrading the PCs in
our Microprocessor Applications lab.  Currently we have flavours of 486
running Win95 with network boot.  PIC development s/w on them is (please
don't laugh) CC5X 1.0, MPALC 4.11 and MPSIM 4.11, targetting the '84 which
is programmed by taking a floppy over to a programming PC with an ASL
progger.  The intention is to move to Pentiums of some flavour running NT
with a fair load of RAM and to upgrade to latest development s/w.  Normal
use is that all 100+ Electronics and Computer Engineering students do one
PIC experiment during their second year, while several do PIC projects in
years 3 and 4 (we often issue one of our PICSTART kits for them to use on a
project lab PC), and PICs can also be used in team design exercises.  We've
bought one copy of PCM for evaluation, and have downloaded latest Microchip
MPASM, MPSIM, MPLAB.  I'd much appreciate any comments on the following
points:

1.  Does anybody run NT?  If so, have you experienced any benefits/problems
related to PIC development?  (I assume MPASM & MPSIM should be OK, as
there's no indication they are anything but really well-behaved DOS
applications, but life ain't always simple...)

2.  Has anybody experienced use of MPLAB in a teaching situation?  We don't
want to have to provide lots of instructions in the lab notes, and I'm not
sure the user interface is intuitive enough to avoid that.  Alternatively,
are the "shells" of MPASM useful as launchers for our limited use?  (To
avoid the lack of '84 support on current tools we use batch files which
dummy a '71 command line which the students don't see - unless they list
the batch - and it would be trivial to convert this for use with MPASM etc.)

3.  For the sort of simple exercise we can get through in a 3 hour lab
(plus preparation time), is there any point in using MPLAB's full
simulation facilities (and presentation) rather than MPSIM?

Thanks in advance,

Tim


Tim Forcer               tmf@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Department of Electronics & Computer Science
The University of Southampton, UK

The University is not responsible for my opinions