On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 02:54, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
> > 1. I agree with Olin almost 100 percent. Learn assembly
> 
> Just to voice the opposition: I think one can do wonderfull things with
> PICs and other microcontrollers without knowning the assembly language
> at all. 

Very true, if you're VERY lucky. There hasn't been a compiler (be it
PIC, PC, HDL, etc.) that I haven't found a bug in. And without knowing
assembly it simply isn't possible to debug a compiler bug yourself.
Which means your at the mercy of others. Call me unreasonable but I
don't like having to rely on others to solve my problems.

> One might even use a library-right language like some Basics and
> know little about the actual PIC hardware. It is all a matter of
> applying the right tools for the right job. So:
> 
> 1. If the job at hand is getting some results with minimal effort, go
> for a basic stamp and forget that it's a PIC. 

Absolutely. In fact, if someone isn't interesting in learning PIC
assembly I'd ONLY recommend this route.

> 2. For better results, at the cost of more effort, go for a bare PIC,
> learn is hardware, and use a HLL to tame the beast. This is the big
> step: use the PIC hardware directly, instead of using some library
> abstraction of it. This can take a *lot* of time, depending on the type
> of PIC you use. Like Eur (Jallist) says: print the datasheet, read the
> datasheet, sleep next to it, *be* the datasheet.
> 
> 3. Next step is knowing the PIC assembly language, so you can get the
> most out of it, while still using HLL. 
> 
> 4. As a last step you might need to rewrite some (often small) parts of
> your code to get the very most out of the chip. 
> 
> 5. Doing a full project in assembler is a nice exercise, but IMHO it is
> seldom justified when you weight the effort against the result.

I don't think anyone is suggesting one has to do the WHOLE project in
assembly, only that knowing assembly is a requirement for doing ANY
project in my mind. 

Most of my work these days is done in C on the PIC, but I certainly
would NOT recommend someone start with C, it hides WAY too much (even if
you don't use the libraries) and God help you if you hit a compiler bug.

As a BARE minimum I would suggest start with MPLAB and assembly, get a
LED to blink, and get the UART to work (with interrupts). At THAT point
move to an HLL, because getting a LED to blink and getting the UART to
work with interrupts will expose you to most of what you will need on
the "knowing assembly" front. TTYL
 
-----------------------------
Herbert's PIC Stuff:
http://repatch.dyndns.org:8383/pic_stuff/

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