For me, I leaned towards the PIC due to my past robotics experience. There are so many codes that you can re-use for the PIC in regards to robotics. Then now when I joined this forum a few months back, I was actually glad that this projects platform is PIC based. Now, I get to re-use some of my old uC. ;D Plus, Basic is where I cut my teeth on to. In robotics world, PIC and Basic is like Peanut Butter and Jelly. ;D All I need to do now is learn C or ASM for MIDIBOX, which is all good. ;D The AVR camp is getting a lot of user base as well IMO. It's almost at the same level as the PIC. The AVR camp is evangilizing all the time that AVR is more feature set than PIC. I would not really know if this is true, since I have no experience with AVR. Kind'a like if you are an Emac guy or Vi, Slack or Debian, KDE or Gnome in *nix world!! cheers!!