Limits, indeed ...

Assembly is fun and interesting to learn. But, to make more complex programs with assembly requires far more experience and knowledge than I can possibly acquire in a few months. I have spent the last few days trying to figure out how to get an LCD-panel to work with a regular PIC (particularly the 16F690 which is the one I have been using lately), and it does not seem to be a problem to control an LCD-panel with this PIC, it is just that I can not find any examples of anyone using exactly this PIC for it, and I have not been able to successfully convert the few examples I have found from other PICs either. It shall be said, I have only tried to make this work in a software simulator (http://www.oshonsoft.com/pic.html), and it could be that I do not use this software as intended, thus not getting it to work. It seems to be a pretty nice piece of software, but as with all software, it has a learning curve to it. Anyway, what I decided to do, was to go back to my Arduino board, follow the tutorial found here: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/lcd.html, and see if I can get that to work. Of course, to make that happen, I once again needed to order some hardware (Futurlec.com is my friend), this time headers, both female and male. The result of that is of course that I will have to wait for a few days (between 5 and 10 they say) before I can actually start with the soldering etc. I any case, seeing how easy it is to control the LCD-panel with Arduino, especially after having the hardware done (which will have to be done in any case, either I decide to go with a PIC and assembly, Arduino or other platforms), I will definitively give that a try. When I got that working, I might try other options as well. I mean, it still sounds better to me to pay $5 for some hardware that will do exactly the same as some other hardware costing $35 (to $50 depending on if you want to use a 'shield' or not). And, as a third option (among several others), it is possible of course to use PICs with Basic or C, which also will make a lot of things much easier to do, than trying to do the same in assembly. I might actually look a bit more into what options I have for Basic, or even C, in the next few days, as I will be waiting for my hardware in any case ...