ELI5
-
-
Replying to @SwiftOnSecurity @cybergibbons
A generation of electrical engineers (over 40 under 60) design everything using a microcontroller called a “PIC” (peripheral interface controller). They are *very* cheap. They perform no security validation.
5 replies 0 retweets 26 likes -
heck... I'm 25 and I would have used a PIC[AXE] as we learned on those in school.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
yeah, my first experience with microcontrollers was PIC too. these days AVR is starting to become more popular, fortunately.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
I learned microcontrollers with the venerable PIC16F84 and descendants, way before Arduino was a thing. It took me over 15 years years to finally jump ship to AVRs for random small projects. Please don't use PICs. For anything. There is literally no metric where they are ideal.
4 replies 6 retweets 31 likes -
Literally no metric? Power consumption, DIP availability, analog peripheral selection, cross-platform vendor-supported tooling, interrupt latency, code density, ease of programming, pin remappability, short-run factory programming, code-gen tools, low-cost debuggers...
3 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @jaydcarlson @kuzetsa and
> cross-platform vendor-supported tooling Since when is "vendor-supported" a positive? PICs have *horrible* C support and the vendor compilers are a complete joke. AVRs have excellent support in gcc. > ease of programming Have you *ever* written PIC asm vs, like, anything else?
1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes -
Replying to @marcan42 @jaydcarlson and
> pin remappability What? At least in my age, you got one (1) pin per special function most of the time, if two clashed, sorry, sucks to be you. Look at modern ARM chips for proper remappability. > short-run factory programming Who cares? Everyone should use in-circuit prog.
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @marcan42 @jaydcarlson and
> low-cost debuggers Seriously, have you tried any other micros? PICs were historically on the *expensive* side of debuggers (ugh ICD2, nevermind the ICE era), until PICkit came along. By then other micros had cheap debuggers too.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @marcan42 @jaydcarlson and
> power consumption That's MSP430 land. > code density Citation needed. Also, RETLW 0x42 > code-gen tools What does this even mean? The PIClist busyloop delay generator?
3 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
> interrupt latency Except for the part where PICs take 4 cycles per insn so they're slower than anything else at actually *running* your IRQ handler, so by the time you've saved your registers the other micros have lower latency. > DIP availability AVRs have always had this.
-
-
Replying to @marcan42 @jaydcarlson and
> analog peripheral selection Maybe? I'll give it to you that PICs have, like, a ridiculously massive variant selection, some with obscure peripherals. If you need a micro to run, like, a fancy switchmode PSU, then maybe suffer through using a PIC, maybe?
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.