PIC24 Dev Tools

shani · Joined: 12 Oct 2007 Posts: 1

Hi
I am currently searching for the following for PIC24, and would appreciate if somebody could please make any recommendations:

1. Dev boards (I want to be able to connect a few hardware chips to the micro on the dev board).
2. Compiler
3. Debug system

CCS compiler/debugger seems fairly new so I wasn't sure if it is good enough. On the other hand, microchip ICD2 is very, very slow for debugging when programming in C language.

Any comments will be very helpful.

Thanks,
Shani

amcfall · Joined: 20 Oct 2005 Posts: 44

I would go with the Microchip C30 compiler. More $$$ but it actually works. With their recent releases they (CCS) have lost me as a customer. When we need to upgrade our compiler it will be C18 and C30. I will not be sending CCS any more money since they seem to think it's our job to test their product. When they released V4 it wasn't even beta quality, more like alpha. I'm still using 3.236 and that'll probably be the last CCS compiler I use. While I love the number of features and ease of use I have lost faith in the quality, I had some issues with 3.x but was able to get them fixed. For a commercial product I think it's pretty poor quality. For a hobby level product it's fine. But we use ours for products that we would like to make money on so quality is more important than price.

Not sure about debugging, ICD2 isn't the fastest at stepping but it's been good enough for me. It does what I need it to fast enough for me. Your mileage may vary.

Avery