PIC vs Arduino?

[S. Dale Morrey]

I guess what I was looking for after doing more homework on the
subject was possibly a review of Arduino vs Amicus18.  Amicus seems to
be Microchip's answer to the Arduino & it's a convincing argument.  If
I were making millions of these things the cost difference of the
PIC18 vs the Atmega328 could really make a difference here, but I
don't see a large market for a home based bio-fuel (gasoline) making
device, so I can't imagine the price difference of a couple dollars is
going to make much different.

Incidentally if you hear a large boom or happen to see a small
mushroom cloud over Orem, it will probably mean I'm not going to be
able to attend plug meetings for awhile :)

Back to what got me on this subject, I have a programmer for the PIC
16 series (Velleman 8048) laying around that I got for my birthday a
few years back, but I've never been much into ASM, C is about as bare
wire as I get.  The arduino & amicus both seem to have support for a
variety of languages including C and just seem to exist for the sole
purpose of making a microcontroller based system accessible to the
layman.

However I've made up my mind, after looking at the overall support and
talking to customer service at both Microchip Direct & Mouser, it
looks like the clear winner for speedy development with lots of
community support is going to be an Arduino, supplied by Mouser.  I
have to admit they have the best customer service & sales team I've
ever seen.
I placed my order today & got a tracking number today.  Just checked &
my uno landed in Salt Lake a few hours ago.  I'll keep you folks
updated on my progress.

Thanks for all the advice & keep it coming, I'm still very curious.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:44 AM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/18/2011 09:52 AM, John Shaver wrote:
>>> Has anyone used either of this with any degree of success?
>>>
>>
>>
>> I am also interested to know more.  I have looked at purchasing an
>> Arduino unit for a while just to play around and see what it can do.
>> Last I checked it wasn't extremely cheap though.   Any success
>> stories?
>
> Arduino seems cheap enough.  If you want cheaper you can look at other
> AtMega-based boards.  Arduino is just an Atmega processor with a
> standardized board, I/O interfaces, programming language and IDE, and
> and the Arduino boot loader.  The latter two aren't really required.
> I've done some minor work on some code with straight avr-gcc and avrdude
> and it was pretty straight forward to upload the code (through an avr
> programmer). Also there are other microcontroller platforms, including
> one that's compatible with Arduino's I/O stuff that is 32-bit.
>
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