Nothing there that the 8051 derivatives don't offer. Not only are 8051's hardware-diverse, they're source-diverse.



You have some valid points there. A hobbyist can't pay thousands for a 'C' compiler. But we have SDCC and there are plenty of cheap 'C' alternatives, and Metalink is a perfectly free assembler.



I guess that depends on the job. :)



Are they? We recently priced parts and for the feature-set we wanted, 8052 was the way to go. Microchip had a similar feature set, but their part was actually more expensive than the 8051 derivative we settled on. Now that I'm having to screw with PIC I'm glad we went with the 8052 anyway.



I seriously doubt that they are any more talented than the 8051 crowd, though they very well may have more time on their hands. I definitely would like to see us share more projects on the net. Unfortunately, I think, most of us use the 8052's for real work and we usually can't share our inventions because they are commercial.



Can the PIC really go that fast? Seems slow as molassis (sp?) to me for everything I'm really wanting to do. I may be the exception, but I've never wanted to count 50 million anythings per second. I have, however, wanted to execute an interrupt quickly without having to figure out what caused it, or toggle a bit on the output line in less than four instructions.



This is the part I'm not understanding. The free tools are good for hobbyists, but you can't build a market on hobbyist parts. The parts aren't that much cheaper, as far as I can tell, and in our case an appropriate 8052 derivative was cheaper than the PIC equivalent. Are companies really using PIC in commercial designs? If we're comparing cheap PICs, isn't the equivalent a small pin-count Philips part at something like 40 or 50 cents?

Regards,
Craig Steiner