On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 05:52:39PM +0200, Sean Schouten wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance, because I too am a beginner in the vast field of
> microcontrollers...

Well welcome aboard.

> I was under the impression that the low and high range of Microchip's
> (regular) PICmicro line were in fact similar enough to start with any
> (regular) pic and migrate to another without too many problems other
> than peripheral addressing etc changing. Is that the case or am I on
> another planet?

It does work for the most part. I think that in the 16F family you run
into paging/banking issues when you ramp up. That's probably why it's
better to ramp down (i.e. start with the biggest best chip and work your
way down).

> I bought a book on amazon.com called "Pic in Practice" by 'D.W.
> Smith', that obviously mainly covers the PIC16F84 (mister popular) and
>  some other PICmicros' that have some other functions that the
> PIC16F84 does not share. I my self just used the book to get started
> with the real basics, on the 12F629 and the 16F684 that I got with the
> PICstart1 kit that got given to me for my birthday. No problems at
> all, and with a little help from the datasheet it all seemed to work
> out just great. So forgive me for not seeing the problem of finding
> the right PICmicro to start with. IMHO just need to start on something
> or rather anything to atleast get the basic feel and understanding.

It's a running debate on the list. It's a theory I call "You love what you
learn". A web blog here: http://unplugd.com/junkyard/?q=node/1
gives an example. To quote:

"If the first tool mastered is a hammer, everything looks like nails.

Studies we carried out at Grant High School, Mt. Gambier, South Australia,
showed that users' preference for applications to do specific tasks, is
closely related to when in their education they were introduced to the
applications. A concrete example: Half a photography class was subjected to
Adobe Photoshop for image manipulation, the other half was using The Gimp.
Halfway through the term, the students swapped 'weapons'. The study showed,
that the ones who were initially using Photoshop didn't like Gimp, and the
'Gimp-borne' students thought that Photoshop was crap.

With this in mind, I move that we need to consider carefully whenever we
introduce new tools to students."

I see the same problem with the 16F84. Start newbies with it and they'll
tend to stick to it like glue. Even if this means going all around the
world to solve an issue that hardware takes care of easily.

BAJ
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