PIC18F K42 family has largest total memory of any 8bit PIC

[Chuckt]

Called the PIC18F K42 family, the range is said to feature the largest total memory of any 8bit PIC MCU, with up to 128kbyte of flash and 8kbyte of RAM

http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electro ... ge/152351/

Might be worth checking out.

[Garth]

I've brought a lot of products to market with the PIC16F's, using an old DOS-based MPLAB assembler and my own home-made programmer. I wanted to use a PIC18 for my last big project (described elsewhere on this forum), but the old assembler would not support PIC18's, and Microchip was obviously not serious about supporting Linux. (I won't use Windows.) Their MPLAB X software wouldn't even install on one of my computers, and installed but promptly crashed on my other one. These are problems I've never had with any other Linux software. A more recent version installed and ran ok, but I have not found a PIC programmer that was supported under Linux. I should try again, since it has been a year or two since I tried last. If you have a recommendation, I'm all ears. I could write the software to program the PIC18's on my home-made programmer as I did for different versions of the 16's, but the 18's programming method is more complex and I'm not sure I want to take the time.

I have the topic here, "moving to another microcontroller family: experiences?" which I would still like to see further discussion on. I have not needed to do any microcontroller projects for work in the last couple of years, but I know it's coming again—but the "when" part is kind of unpredictable. The PIC18's would probably present the least effort to get going in since a lot of my PIC16 knowledge would carry over. OTOH, it might also present the least improvement in computing power. The 18's fix some of the problems of the 16's (by adding kludges), but still leave a lot of the same problems. I might have a great work opportunity coming up in the next year or two if I learn the MSP430. A few people I'm in frequent contact with really like the AVR's too. As it stands now, I know almost nothing about them.

[Chuckt]

Garth,

I would try the 43oh community and then TI's community for getting started. They are more knowledgeable and can help you more than I can.

http://43oh.com/

http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/tools-softwar ... pport.page

http://www.instructables.com/id/msp430- ... -Projects/

https://www.hackster.io/ti-launchpad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_MSP430

If it were me, I would find books on Amazon's kindle which are cheaper than paperback books. You can also get the Amazon app for free on your computer or smart phone and get books for less than paperback using the Kindle app. You can find these books by going to Amazon and seeing if there is a Kindle version and you can read it from the Amazon app.

Chuck

[Chuckt]

Ti MSP 430 Microcontroller users group (Yahoo)

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/msp ... =293062608

I also did a search on Parallax forums regarding the MSP 430:

http://forums.parallax.com/search?Search=msp+430

I hope this helps and I would like to help more even though I don't know how to program it.

[brad]

Garth - are you looking to go for 8-bit microcontrollers or are you looking to beef things up a bit and go for 16 or 32-bit microcontrollers?

[Garth]

Brad, definitely no 32's. I'm committed to the little guys. I think the MSP430 and AVR are 16-bit, and maybe it also makes a difference also whether 16 describes the data bus too or just the register size. I do like the 65816 microprocessor which has registers that are 8/16-bit selectable, 16-bit stack pointer, and 24-bit addresses, but the data bus in only 8 bits. My experience with TI over the last 30 years has consistently been that their technical customer support is absolutely terrible. OTOH, I've also opened service tickets with Microchip on their website asking about various things about PIC microcontrollers, things that are either missing from the data sheets or are unclear or obviously an error, and their people waste everyone's time by firing off an irrelevant answer before reading the whole question. So frustrating. Then I have to get back to them and say, "No, I know that, but that's not what I was asking about. Please read the question again!"

And Chuck, thankyou for the links!

[brad]

I've been sticking with the 18F series for a long time now (well, long time for me anyway - about 7 years)

AVR's are an 8-bit micro also as far as I am aware and as this wikipedia article shows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel_AVR

I can't see why I would need anything more than an 8-bit micro for my projects.