Quote:
I'm having a play with my DAB module and I've realised that I'm not going to get away without a PIC being plumbed in to do some i2c to serial port conversions. I've got a cheap PIC blower and dev board and written a few very simple things in assembler. I feel it would be better to continue in a language I'm more familiar with.

So, any recommendations?


Personally I'd pick up something like a AVR dev. board because it has JTAG on it and you can buy an ("clone") emulator for $40 (www.olimex.com) that works with the ATMEL tools. It's far easier to develop with an emulator rather than the "Write, Burn, Test" loop. I've never tried 'C' on the AVR or PIC only assembler, but on any of the 8 bitters I can't imagine it's that great. I think that microchip are much more expensive for emulators than atmel.

I dislike writing anything in assembler thesedays, far too much time overhead with zero portability.

A philips LPC kit (ARM7) could be had for less than $70, one of the project's I'm working on at work uses one of that family and they're pretty cool little processors, I use 'C' on that without problem, and again it's JTAG so emulation is dirt cheap.

Adrian