> Has anyone else gone looking for a PIC at the > new Microchip.com site and been really miffed > by the way they have changed it?? I noticed their new Java interface the other day too. Yes, it's a lot slower with no apparent adavantages, but you're missing the point. Web sites have to be cool, which of course means using all the latest technology with maximal TLAs. Lots of spiffy animated graphics is a must too. Sure, actual site visitors may get annoyed at how long it takes to download every page, but that's the price of progress. But most importantly this stuff is much more fun and profitable for the web developers than creating those old fashion content-laden pages. Who'd want to be caught dead with one of those on their resume! By the way, each page seemed to have three choices down the bottom about web page style. The default was the new Java stuff. It seemed that if you selected the non-Java mode you ended up with the old site. > OK, maybe Microchip do provide a "search" facility, > (but it's not working at the moment). Yeah, what a crock! I was delighted to hear they had finally set up a parametric search engine, so I gave it a little test drive to see what it could do. Just to pick something, the task I set for myself was to find all the PICs that have both UART and IIC modules. The first page is broken into two separate boxes, labeled something like "general parameters" and "specific parameters". I never did understand the distinction and why they had to be separate. You could only select one I/O module at a time, so I started by asking for all PICs with UARTs. I looked at the list and indeed it seemed to have found the right matches. OK, so now I figured I could search this list for those PICs that have IIC modules, which should yield the list that has both UARTs and IICs. Down the bottom of the list it says to hit the refine button below to refine your search, except that there is nothing below. Duh! Didn't they test this at all?!! So I went back to the previous page with the two blocks of choices. This time I selected IIC module and hit "refine". This generated a list of all PICs with IIC modules, not just the ones in my previous search results. Argh!! So how does one refine an existing search as apposed to starting a new one? I never did figure this out, but I know it's not done with the "refine" button. I noticed the whole search engine was taken down a day after I pointed this out to the folks a Microchip. Maybe they are fixing it. > And ADD PRICES! Yes, yes, please! Yes, I understand real prices vary, but at least some form of relative prices would be very useful. I suggest the quantity 1000 list price, but anything consistant will do. The purpose is not to figure out exactly how much a design will cost to produce, but rather some idea of the cost of tradeoffs. > I am real annoyed at having to click on EVERY > SINGLE PIC (and then wait) just to see how much > memory or pins it has!!! Check out the line card. That's what it's for. The new Q1 2001 line cards are being sent out now, so this is a good time to ask for one from you local office. You can also download the PDF from the web site. The line card is my primary tool for chosing a PIC, especially since the parametric search engine is so useless. ***************************************************************** Olin Lathrop, embedded systems consultant in Devens Massachusetts (978) 772-3129, olin@embedinc.com, http://www.embedinc.com -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu