Future of Microchip Development Tools? See inside...

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MPLab is fine, but the cost of the C compilers for their family of PIC and dsPIC processors is a consideration compared to ATMEL and GNU.

Regarding tools that suck, while Analog Devices Visual DSP++ is actually a pretty nice tool, the support of that tool really sucks. If you try to do anything atypically your own your own. They don't appear to have inhouse expertise on their own toolset.

I started using Microchip's dsPIC on a project and abandoned it in favor of TI. The fact that I found the tools absolutely abysmal had a lot to do with my decision. The other factor was that for less money, I was able to get a much more powerfull TI processor.

The tools crashed constantly and irrecoverably even took my development project with it on one occasion

Using C or assembly?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I worked with a friend on a project using the same processor (dspic

I didn't even get that far on my project before switching to TI. I was using the MPLAB and the visual configuration tool to plan out the desired pin assignments for the chip in preparation for PCB layout. By that point, I was displeased enough with Microchip that I didn't want to continue with using them any longer. I would have to say, that overall, I am as pleased with TI as I was displeased with Microchip.

See, there's the problem. You should never try to think about work during "rum" time. :-|

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. It's Friday.

Scott

I hear you there! I must have had "rum" on the brain then too!

You can program dsPIC using gcc. Somebody has ported the microchip changes over to linux. It would be nice to figure out how to use the microchip runtime monitor to drive GDB, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.