I was a field application engineer for Microchip from 2008-2011, making
POCs for big name customers in the bay area using 8, 16 and 32-bit PICs.
You will likely find that Microchip support is awful, even if their
products are pretty neat. There was an Arduino port for PICs called
"ChipKit" but I don't know if that's still being developed.
The PicKit 3 is decent, if pretty slow. The ICD3 and later versions are
good. MPLAB X is excellent IMO. I should still hold a design partner
discount so if you want to get some tools, contact me offline and I'll see
if I can save you some money.
That all said, I'm a huge fan of the STM32 ARM devices and the community is
nearly as good as Nordic, and what Atmel used to be before it was acquired
by Microchip.
--
Anders Nelson
On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 4:26 PM Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 3/3/21 10:47 AM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote:
Any
gotchas with the PICKit-3 clones out there? I have the feeling
that sticking with PIC would be better than trying to port to
Arduino, and imagine that as things continue to age there will be
more applications for interfaces. Any better but still cheapish
alternatives for programming?
IIRC the PK-3 doesn't get any new device support at this point.
Existing stuff continues to work. Depending on the nature of the
devices you might want to use in the future, it might be worth
considering a PK-4.
I've used a PK-2 on PIC32MX devices. I used MPLAB for a time, but
OpenOCD also supports it. After all, it's JTAG, sort of.
What chips specifically? On the PIC12 through PIC18 devices, I used the
JDM cheapie with PonyProg. Of course, you need a real serial port--I
don't know of a USB one will work.
Personally, you might find it more interesting to go with some of the
STM32 ARM Cortex MCUs. Many are 5V tolerant and will probably be around
for a long time. There's even an Arduino suite or two for the low-end
ones.
--Chuck