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Best PIC Starter Kit?

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maximum_overdrive

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Hi,
I want to get my feet wet with a microcontroller starter kit, but I am having trouble finding clear guidance for a good choice. I see kits for example from Microchip.com and from mikroe.com and others, but would appreciate some recommendations.

This is what I am hoping to achieve: I am very experienced with analog and digital electronics, but have not programmed microcontrollers. I dont have a specific application in mind, but want a starter kit that is versatile enought that it includes enough peripherals to have some fun with, such as displays, input keys, and ADC and DAC interfaces.

I think my preference is for the PIC micros. Is it best to start with an 8bit system, or go with 16 or 32 bit? I dont want to get 8bit and then find its too limited and wish I had got 16 or 32bit.

I would prefer a kit that includes the compiler/debugger etc. It is unclear to me if people generally use C for coding, or if you stay with assembler.

Price is less important to me than getting a good versatile poduct. Please help steer me to a good choice.
Thanks.
 

Hi,

Thats an often asked question in this and other forums, and there are , I'm afraid, as many differing answers.

Software wise, many say start off with assembler as this will teach you much more about the actual pic chips architecture, but as you progess onto the top end projects you will have to move onto C for things like USB, SD cards, Ethernet CAN etc. as Microchip has only produced software for them in C.

However to start with, the lowly pic16F 8 bit chips will serve you well and there are countess example for the on the web.

Microchips Free MPLAB development system includes an Assembler and you can download its free C compliers for whatever pic chip family you get .


For a dev board, I would say look for one that is expandable, rather than having countless leds already on board.
There are many around but be carefull of some ike the Mikroe boards which are not 100% compatible with Mplab, not a problem in the early days but can be on the higher projects.

Have a good search on this forum and also a look at this Sticky for some futher info. Its mostly good but the programmer info is out of day - simple replace it with the Microchip Pickit2.

https://www.electro-tech-online.com...wcomers-please-read-pic-regarded-upd-0xd.html

One further route, if you are into doing your own wiring /soldering etc, is to build you own dev board.. to start with you only need a simple psu, a few leds and switches and an lcd + a pickit2 - a pcb version of mine is here but my original was on stripboard hand wired.
 

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