PCWHD (PIC24) in a production enviroment

Jeff King · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 5:40 am

Hello:

I've used PCWH (PIC18) CCS in a product environment, and had reasonably good luck with it. Last I looked on the forum for PCWHD (PIC24) it didn't seem quite ready for prime time.

Beyond the normal CCS gotcha's, is anyone using PCWHD (PIC24) CCS compiler in a production environment yet and are you reasonably happy with it?

Thanks

Jeff

temtronic · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 6:27 am

Have to ask, is there something 'special' about the 24 series that you really can't do with the 18 series PICs?

Jeff King · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 6:29 am

Yes, they wanted USB on the Go. Any thoughts on the PIC24 version of CCS?

bkamen · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 7:02 am

I suppose it depends on what you're doing with PIC24 (in terms of code complexity)...

Another consideration is that Microchip has some pretty extensive libraries that don't compile so well for PCD. If MCHP library use is in that future, I would consider C30 from Mchip.

PCD isn't too bad otherwise, but some might argue (including me) that it's not quite there yet.

I've run into some pretty dumb bugs as have others. Nothing I've never been able to work around for the moment --- and eventually have fixed by the CCS folks... but... it is what it is.

So with that..

YMMV,

-Ben
_________________
Dazed and confused? I don't think so. Just "plain lost" will do. :D

Jeff King · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 7:06 am

Yes, the "not too bad" is what I was looking for. I like CCS over the MicroChip product as in general, I seem more productive with CCS. But it does have to do the job.

I just seemed to realize they (CCS) may not have USB OTG support yet. I have a query into them on that.

Jeff King · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 1:04 pm

Here is my response from CCS on if they had OTG/Host mode examples. Unfortunately, it appears to be the same answer that was re-posted on this forum ~11 months ago.

----

We don't have any examples or code to do this.

It should not be hard to port Microchip's code to CCS. This is something I have on my table, I just don't have an ETA for doing this. We are always adding better out-of-the box support for elements in Microchip's C18 and C30 compiler, which is why it shouldn't be hard to port it.

Thanks,
CCS

bkamen · Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 3:28 pm

Douglas Kennedy · Joined: 07 Sep 2003 Posts: 755 Location: Florida

PCWHD had teething problems.....it seems to have been stable for a while now. You if you look at the microchip forums you'll see a bunch of issues. I'm having some pretty sloppy issues with Microchip's WDS. Sure they'll fix it next release maybe several months away. CCS has issues as well .... the complaint some have is CCS fixes things too quickly making you could say most releases beta versions. Many of us kind of know this so we keep older versions and often save the compiler in the production release just in case of regression. Not that bad a technique in any case especially since we have DVD writers and 1TB disks.