AVR or PIC to start programming Microcontroller? [closed]

Answer 1

I love AVR. its easy to program and resources available. there are few community like arduino works with it.

Answer 2

I started on a Motorola M68HC11, it was simple enough. I think you'll get about the same experience with any 8Bit controllers.

Answer 3

I've done some PIC programming - mostly because I liked the idea the chip were only a dollar or two. However, for a beginner, making a decision solely on price is premature optimization.

Programming in assembler is an experience. You basically have to learn about 100 concepts before you can blink an LED. (Watchdog timer, reset pins, 8-bit counters/overflows, delay loops, hex, binary, bit-masking, interrupts, interrupt service requests, IO ports, etc.) It's all very educational - and a great feeling to get so close to the machine - but being able to code something in C will hide some of this complexity so you can focus on results. For this reason I would say go with the AVR. (And I believe the prices are now closer to PICs.)

Also: If you're interested in getting things done (and don't mind spending ~$30) check out the arduino. A guy selling them at my local electronics shop was saying he's selling tons of them to art students. (It uses the IDE from the Processing project, and compiles code with avr-gcc.)

Update: Fixed comment that Arduino runs interpreted code. Also updated the approx Arduino price.

Answer 4

I very much prefer the AVR over PIC, whose architecture I find a bit messy. This may be just me, and it won't trouble you if you can write in a high level language, most likely (some dialect of) C.

Since you're new to microcontrollers I presume performance will not be the issue, so instead I would look for availability of development tools: prototyping boards, IDE and simulation/debugging tools. Personally I liked AVR Studio (Atmel's free development environment) a lot.

Jason mentions the TI's MSP430, which is an excellent controller indeed, especially if you're in very low power applications. But I wouldn't recommend it for a newbie, since configuration is a bit cumbersome. (I recall that the description of the oscillator covered 20+ pages in the user manual.)

Answer 5

Some more dicussion about the superiority of AVR, on the other Stack Overflow: http://embeddedgurus.com/stack-overflow/2009/04/pic-stack-overflow/

The popularity of 8 bit PICs baffles me. It’s architecture is awful – the limited call stack is just the first dreadful thing. Throw in the need for paging and banking together with the single interrupt vector and you have a nightmare of a programming model. It would be one thing if this was the norm for 8 bit devices – but it isn’t. The AVR architecture blows the PIC away, while the HC05 / HC08 are also streets ahead of the PIC. Given the choice I think I’d even take an 8051 over the PIC. I don’t see any cost advantages, packaging advantages (Atmel has just released a SOT23-6 AVR which is essentially instruction set compatible with their largest devices) or peripheral set advantages. In short, I don’t get it! Incidentally, this isn’t an indictment of Microchip – they are a great company and I really like a lot of their other products, their web site, tech support and so on (perhaps this is why the PIC is so widely used?)

Answer 6

On of the best features of AVR is the community in the forums at www.avrfreaks.net. You get a bunch of experienced electronics engineers hanging out, willing to help newbies to get going.