Re: reply
Roboticinfo said:
Well everything the Z8 does the PIC can do to, but it all depends on what you are a custom to. Anyway the PIC is cheaper when it come's to weekly projects because most people are not going to want to buy a board and elec. They would rather buy a $7.95 dollar PIC, but if you do it rarely then surely that is the why to go in some people's opinions.
Well, no, that's not true. There are some obscure things like built in IRDA interface that the PIC doesn't have. Well, I haven't seen it on a PIC.
I'm not certain what you're talking about with 'a board and electronics' and the price. I'm not certain if you know what we're even talking about here. We're talking about the Z8 Encore, not the old Z8. The Z8E chips tend to be only slightly more expensive than PICs, but then they also include alot of built in hardware blocks, I2C, SPI, IRDA, UARTs... are included on every chip that has enough pins to support them. I usually use the middle of the line 28pin 8k chips now, which are $3.00 USD in single quantities from Mouser. Obviously cheaper in bulk. The full blown 64k 68pin PLCC chips are around $7.00 USD. They all use the same programmer and development environment.
I'm with Nigel, and whatever MCU fits the job best, is the best MCU at that time. I'd have to disagree with him on what the best one to start out with is, the Z8E is just so much easier to start out with. Included development environment with compiler and assembler, 1 wire fast reliable in circuit programming and debugging.
I'm no fanatic though. The Z8E is just too hard to get outside of North America and it doesn't have the shear number of users for support (though it does have user support).