At 09:56 AM 4/20/2004, Byron A Jeff wrote: >One question (in general): any particular reason folks are so enamored with >the 8 pin parts? Personally I avoid them like the plague due to extremely >limited I/O and complete inability to have a bootloader. Unless you're talking >about a 1000+ unit run, the costs between the 8 pin part and a hefty capable >40 pin part with all the bells and whistles (12F629 and 16F871 as examples) >is only a 3X price difference. In hobbyist/small scale run terms, the price >is negligable. I've got one board that uses 8- 12c508 PICs, another board that uses 5, one more that uses 4. I'm just finishing up my first medium-volume product using a 16f630. But I've also got lots of boards that use the larger PICs. Lots of tiny PICs on a single board was the easiest solution for a few specific projects. It would have been much harder to try and fit all the necessary functions into a single large device and still maintain the required response times (over-current protection for high current PWM controllers is one example). I'd have to say that I now reach for an 8 pin PIC just about anytime I need to do something that formerly used discrete logic or a small PLD. The 12c508 is a marvelous device - quirky but marvelous. I think that we use around 500 or so per month, with 12f675 and all the other (larger) 14 & 16 bit parts being a distant minority. I'm not working with the 18F parts yet - just waiting for the dust to settle on the errata sheets. Price is the main reason I use the 12c508. Most of our high volume products fit quite nicely into 5 or 6 i/o pins and often need less than 200 words of code. The 12c508 is almost overkill, except that its the smallest part Microchip makes. dwayne PS - one of our suppliers asked if we would consider changing to the 12f629 if they matched the price of the 12c508. I'm not even barely interested - the 12c508A has been extremely robust in the real world applications we subject them to. There would have to be a significant cost savings with a different part before I'd consider going to all the work of migrating to and qualifying that different part. Just matching the price of the PIC would actually cost us money. dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax Celebrating 20 years of Engineering Innovation (1984 - 2004) .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .-. .- `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' Do NOT send unsolicited commercial email to this email address. This message neither grants consent to receive unsolicited commercial email nor is intended to solicit commercial email. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu