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I don't see it as overkill myself, time saver yes!

Well, as a budding hobbiest, I'm less interested in saving time -- it's a hobby, after all, it's supposed to suck up time.

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Olimex make full populated ready to go breakout boards on standard dip pitch if that's what is worrying you.

Well, my initial investigation of PICs leads me to believe that the standard MO is to develop your own custom circuit, and just add in whatever PIC you need. If I understand this, you're suggesting that I could just get something like the LPC-H2124, and I'm set to begin the programming part, as opposed to having to piece together a minimal circuit (aside from the leads to the steering wheel controls, to continue my previous example project).

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Things will be easier on the ARM because:

1) You'll be able to program in 'C' and have confidence that the compiler is generating valid code.

This would, indeed, make things simpler -- especially since I could then work on a linux machine. (The PIC resources for Linux are a little more scarce than for Windows.)

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2) They have plenty of RAM & FLASH and a good smattering of on board peripherals.

Perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of RAM and FLASH is necessary for simple projects. I'm not, after all, attempting to build an embedded web-server. And smatterings of peripherals, while handy when developing something where you want to give options, seems like a waste of space and resources, when I'm building something for a very specific purpose. (Of course, if you mean that I have the option of choosing boards with different peripherals (whether solo, or in groups), then I suppose I'd agree with that.

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3) They're much of a muchness in terms of price for hobbyists if you compare to pics.

Perhaps we're looking at different price lists, or I haven't done a sufficient investigation, but it appears that, while the initial outlay will be comparable (PIC + programmer + assorted bits vs. ARM board + jTag), the PIC route is cheaper once you start doing subsequent projects (depending on what the "assorted bits" are, I suppose, and in my case, I have a big drawer full of "assorted bits" that have been awaiting repurposing).

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Here's some random urls [...]

Ah, thanks. I'll browse through those.