I have absolutely NO problems with serial communications. I have written 
several. Interpretation of
GPS NEMA coding, interface with a PC, RS485, RS422, even synchronous 
communication from a
pager. I have run the PIC as fast as 250kb for DMX512 (theatrical 
lighting standard). I've done all of it.

The main problem you will have in using PICs is that your receiving and 
transmitting buffers must be
small, because many of the PICs don't have much memory. You can 
alleviate this greatly by designing
in a 32K SPI RAMTRON scratch pad memory. These memories, unlike EEPROMS, 
need NO write waits.
Otherwise, just write the code carefully. Receive using an interrupt, 
and write in the main loop whenever
the UART can accept another character. When you have received 16 
characters, shove it into the RAMTRON
memory.

Its just like most stuff, after awhile it becomes second nature, like 
riding a bicycle.

--Bob

Dr Skip wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I've done just a little bit of playing around with microcontrollers
> (PICs) and I try to read everything here one the list, at least to the
> level of what to watch out for should I have to do 'that' some day.
> Having written Zmodem code on a PC at one point, I know comm code can be
> frustrating to get right. From the list it seems there are similar
> experiences getting serial comm going on a PIC. In fact, serial comm is
> one of those things I keep putting off for the PIC...
>
> Is there a code repository anywhere for PIC code modules? I think most
> compilers allow inline assy lang., so that might be most useful,
> understanding that any particular module may only be useful to a small
> group of part numbers. Initialising ports seems to be a common challenge
> here too. Maybe modules that are bullet-proof for that as well. Such a
> thing is a great learning tool, and I've used and contributed to other
> PC repositories in the past. However, in the PIC world, there's also so
> much else to debug - the code, hardware, setup, interfaces, etc, that
> having some pieces of known quality might make the job a bit easier,
> especially beyond just sensing a voltage and operating relays. In other
> repositories, you end up with hacks and the not-so-good examples as well
> as the great and elegant ones. I'm hoping that a repository exists, and
> with the expertise here, it's be a good one. Can anyone point me to one
> or more?
>
> Thanks,
> Skip
>
>
>   

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