My picaxes arrived!

[Dingo]

Yay, finally the picaxe chips I ordered arrived now I can have a play with Microcontrollers


BTW the importer (Microzed) said that in the last 18 months since he has been importing them he has imported over a tonne's worth of picaxes (and no he wasn't speaking figuratively )

Being ICs they weight nothing so that means there are a lot of picaxe chips in Australia!

[ZapBrannigan]

Have fun! Micro's are great.
They can really simplify the design you use for any project.
As a start, look into what you need to do to clock them, whether you need/want an external crystal or whether you use the internal oscillator (if it has one).
This is important, just so that you can set up serial interfaces with correct baud, etc.
Have you got a c compiler for it or are you using an assembler compiler? Also have you got a software debugger for it, or will you be reliant on external methods such as turning on LED's and stuff?

Cheers,
Michael

[Dingo]

Being picaxes they are designed for newbies.

I purchased the 18x model which has an internal 4Mhz resonator and provides 15in/out pins. It programs via a serial cable directly so no need for a pic programmer. You can overclock the 28x up to 16Mhz beacuase it uses a serparate clock.

The biggest negative of these things is the fact I can't seem to find a C compiler for them, I'll just have to live with their free BASIC compiler - haven't touched BASIC in about 10 years

Anyway the 18x can only take programs up to 600 lines approx so I should be able to use BASIC happily.

Anyway these things look really useful - very little needed to get them going....

[Dingo]

These things are great - takes all of two whole minutes to get them to work!

The only drawback is that because it is BASIC and not C I keep having to go back and delete semi-colons for the ends of lines. Force of habit

Seriously these PICAXEs are a wonderful product - and so cheap!