AVR or PIC to start programming Microcontroller? [closed]

Answer 1

My boss picked up the basics using AVR within a week without prior experience.

Answer 2

http://www.arduino.cc/

HTH

Answer 3

I would suggest AVR. It has far surpassed PIC as the microcontroller platform of choice for general hobbyist projects. Most notably, consider the Arduino (and other *duino) platform, which provides a high end AVR in an easy to interface and popular form factor.

Answer 4

My vote goes to PIC for the extreme variety of devices availables. But I must say that when I started to use PICs, they was almost nothing else. Maybe now things are changed.

Answer 5

I vote for TI's MSP430 series. I've used PICs extensively (also Atmel chips a little) and by far the most important thing to me is a good debugging IDE. TI has done a pretty good job on this, and their C++ compiler works really well. You can get going with an eval board for less than $100 including an IDE + USB-debugger. The PICs have better & more diverse hardware peripherals, but MPLAB is a piece of crap and the only C++ IDE for PICs is one by IAR which is rather expensive. (more than $2K)

Answer 6

I had much more success with PIC while I was just getting started. I tried to get a simple starter kit from Arduino and just couldn't get a good basic kit without spending more than $100-200 nickel and diming the setup together. Got a great little starter kit from PIC for about $40 and it has everything: IDE, programmer, starter board with built in circuitry for demos and tutorials. One purchase. Also, the PIC environment was very easy to get set up and working. I was playing with it within an hour.