Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Electronics => Electronics => Topic started by: szhang on July 07, 2008, 04:54:41 PM

Title: Why aren't dsPICs more popular?
Post by: szhang on July 07, 2008, 04:54:41 PM

So i've all but decided to use dsPICs for my next robot, and while googling online I found that these chips are surprisingly unpopular.  I mean, compared to normal PICs or even AVRs, they are quite a bit more powerful (especially if you count the dsp stuff), they have a fairly good architecture compared to the pic16/pic18 family, and you can get a free compiler (gcc port, though less optimization for the free version).

The only thing I find that could hold people back is the programmer, but PICkit 2 isn't prohibitively expensive.

Title: Re: Why aren't dsPICs more popular?
Post by: Commanderbob on July 08, 2008, 09:50:51 AM

I don't know why they are not as popular, but I have used them in a few projects where PIC were not enough. I had no problems. It worked a lot like a PIC except it is a 16 bit processor not 8 bit.