Atmel AVR vs. Microchip PIC

[c0nsumer]

This is probably a pretty hot topic, and is somewhat off-topic for the board but I'm going to throw it out anyway.

I'm looking at picking up one of the MikroElektronika dev boards, either the AVR or PIC one, and I'm not sure which to get. The reason I'm not sure is I really don't know which I should start seriously learning, PIC or AVR. I know that the MIDIbox stuff is all done in PIC, but lots of other MIDI stuff is also done in AVR.

I've also been Googling around about this, and I can't seem to find a reason to pick one over the other. So I guess what I'm asking is why do you (whoever you are) prefer one versus the other? Is it just what you are familiar with? Is it the (from what I've been reading) more straightforward ASM in AVR? Is it what your job requires? Or... what?

Eventually I'd like a better understanding of both, but I don't want to try to learn both in parallel. That'd be stupid.

Thanks very much...

-Steve

[stryd_one]

PIC. My motivations are simple...

There's some stuff available for both PIC and AVR, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, you'll grow equally familiar with whichever one you choose, given time.... I think they pretty much balance out. MIOS does everything I need so it sways my vote to whatever MBHP is using.

If you're doing something new, that propellor chip could be hot....

[MRE]

The answer to this question depends a lot more on you than me (or anyone else). What languages do you currently know? What languages do you want to learn?  Are you comfortable with the idea of bank switching if you need to write in assembly?

As to comparing hardware options, each chip has a huge family to choose from, and you can bet that if you find an AVR with x, y, and z on it, you can find a PIC with the same.

The PICs unfortunately have changes from sub family to sub family, meaning that when you move up to the bigger feature chips, you might have to 'relearn' a few things (especially about its memory).

What sort of features do you forsee using all the time?

Most importantly.. How comfortable are you with 'going it alone?"  The PIC has litterally 15 plus years of example code to draw from. The AVR is catching up certainly.. but you can find example code for virtually anything on the PIC in every imaginable language. IF you are not comfortable with the idea of not having a lot of examples to learn from, then absolutely DONT try the Propeller. Wait a few years for it to get a big following (and it will.. its a great looking chip!)

How much resource do you need? PIC has a LOT of good books written about it. Myke Predko has writtin the bible on PICs and its not just recommended.. I would say its required.

[docbrown]

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!!

[c0nsumer]

I ended up ordering the PIC board for a couple of reasons... One, everything I've done thus far has been PIC related. Two, I've got some spare PICs and programmers and such laying around home. Three... It's what I originally intended. I can always get the AVR board later if need.

Hopefully it'll be pretty nice... It looks like a good all-in-one experimentation platform. I also added on the ethernet module, the RTC, and the CF reader.