Electronic badges

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

> As noted in my posting about the Ontario LinuxFest I
> am opening up the electronic name badge can of worms
> again. So, with that in mind let note the strengths
(snip)

To anyone considering a single-chip microprocessor project using the PIC,
I would strongly recommend looking at the Atmel AVR series of
microprocessors. The Microchip PIC is arguably more popular, but - based
on my experience implementing code on it and the AVR - it has some serious
architectural deficiencies.
- limited number of instructions leads to opaque assembly language code
- bank-switched registers and paged memory make for convoluted code and
complex debugging environment

Anyone who challenges this is invited to write a routine that simply pumps
out a section of memory to a host computer. On the AVR, it's about three
lines of code. On the PIC, it's an ugly, non-intuitive hack.

A compliler can hide many of the architectural warts of the PIC, but there
are good reasons for projects of this type to work in assembly language.
The code size is smaller and C tends to hide certain types of bugs.

Comparable IC's and development systems are available for both devices.
Prices are similar.

Peter

-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists