Hector Martin

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.

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...

> 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?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

> MSP430 land There's at least competition in this space now. There's the SimpleLink series from TI (e.g. CC1312R with 60 µA/MHz) or ST's ultra low power ones with similar power consumption.

There's also Maxim's practically unusable DARWIN series which don't even have a programming manual and require you to use their SDK, which also last time I checked, has no documentation.