On Mon, 2007-04-23 at 22:48 +0200, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> > Personally I'd recommend people go straight to the 30F parts.
> 
> Personaly, I think that's a bit to far for a startup-hobbyist.
> The lack of online resources is a major factor.

Not really. Sure, there are tons of 16F84 projects out there, but in my
experience having referenced them it can get very frustrating how poorly
documented some of them are. Beyond the "hello world" project of
blinking an LED, I don't see that much of an advantage to the "online
resource" factor (in fact, seeing how poorly some are done it might be
better for the beginner to skip them completely instead of giving up in
frustration because an online example was just wrong).

> > There are several 28pin DIP 30F parts available
> 
> As today with a number of PIC24 devices. And then you
> do not have to worry about the "DSP" letters... :-)

True, except until very recently there were no DIP versions. Also, many
of them are only 3.3V, a BIG problem for a hobbyist IMHO (although most
of my recent hobbyist designs are 3.3, beginners should start at 5V
simply because of the larger peripheral selection still needing 5V, i.e.
LCD modules).

Another wonderful advantage of the 30F line is voltages are less
important, there is no "LF" version like with the 16F/18F parts. You
want to run at 3.3V or 5V? Go ahead, only thing to worry about is max
available OSC speed at the lower VDD (again, usually not a problem for a
beginner since they'll invariably likely start with internal RC OSC).

TTYL

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