APG Consultancy LTD
Microchip PIC
Microchip Technology Inc produce a large number of microcontrollers, analog, interface and memory devices. One of their most popular devices is their range of PIC microcontrollers.
There is an extensive range of PIC microcontrollers with a wide range of capabilities, from 8 pin 8 bit devices up to 100+ pin 32 bit devices.
One of the major advantages of the PIC range of microcontrollers is there low cost. For example, a devlopment kit including demo board, programmer and software can cost as low as £30. Shown below is the DV164120 Starter Kit complete with PICkit 2 programmer.
The kit above includes a PIC 16F690 device mounted on a small board. This board can be purchased seperately and used in your own projects. Also available is the board shown below which has the more powerful 16F877.
Shown below is a table showing a small number of the PIC devices available and their rough cost:
Device
PIC16F690
(8 Bit)
PIC16F877
(8 Bit)
PIC32MX460F512L
(32 Bit)
14K
512K
Program Space
(Bytes)
7K
RAM
(Bytes)
256
368
32K
EEPROM
(Bytes)
256
256
-
Extras
EUSART, I2C, SPI, ADC
I2C, PSP, SPI, USART, ADC
EUART, I2C, PMP, PSP, SPI, ADC, USB
Pins
20
44
121
Cost
£1.40
£4.50
£6.10
Demo boards are available for all the devices shown in the table above.
When using a C compiler to produce code it is easy to switch between devices with different capabilities.
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