On Mar 19, 2009, at 3:33 PM, solarwind wrote:

> The arduino is a huge hit. Unfortunately, it uses the atmel chips.
> Well, some like atmel chips, but I don't like them.
>
> The arduino is awesome. It's extensible, easy to use, clean, small  
> and fun.
>
> So why don't we make our own? With the PIC, that is. I know it's
> definitely possible. The 28 pin 16Fs and 18Fs can do self write to
> flash. So if we get a USB PIC or use a normal PIC with a FT232 type
> chip, we can make a standalone development board that can load
> programs via USB. The bootloader shouldn't be hard to make either. And
> we also have really nice compilers: CCS, Microchip, HITECH which I
> believe far outperform atmel's in terms of code size optimization.
> Also, our 18F chips are way cooler than atmel's.
>
> So why don't we do it?
>
> Some guy already made a PIC32 standalone dev board called the UBW32.
> So let's do this with the 8 bit chips?
>
> -- 
> solarwind

The hard part about mirroring the success of the Arduino platform  
isn't the hardware. It is the development environment. It is _very_  
easy to use even if you don't know C or anything about programming  
microcontrollers. The libraries are extensive and make it easy to do  
many common tasks without fiddling with pointers, flags, ASM, or low  
level pin manipulation.

Giving a novice any of the aforementioned IDEs wouldn't make for an  
appealing environment.

-Pete
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