Moving on?

I've been struggling for a long time now, to see if there is a way to develop programs for PICs that can be done on one of my macs. It is very tempting to jump over to the MS side of town, just to make it so much easier on myself. It is, however, not easy to do this, since I've been a mac user now for about 20 years. Still, it is very tempting. I did buy an old PC with Windows XP installed on it, and although this works very well, it is a somewhat old and noisy computer, which is part of why I'd like to stick to my iMac for as long as possible. It is nice to have all your programs, IDEs, and whatnots in one place as well. Apart from doing PIC-programming, I also like to develop apps for use with a computer, for example with the likes of Processing/Java, and OpenFrameworks. These programs works like a charm on my mac. They would probably work very well under Windows as well, though, so the question is still there: Should I go for a PC with Windows instead? At some point, I probably will. So, instead of just blabbering on, I will make a list (not sorted in any way) with some interesting software and hardware (all related to Microcontrollers somehow) I have found so far.

Windows specific:

• MPLAB IDE
• JalEdit
• AVR Studio 4

Cross platform:


• OpenFrameworks
• NerdKits (Atmel AVR starterkit etc)
• Jal (command line on Mac) and a nice manual. Also, a link to a small bug fix.
• Hi-Tide C compiler (for PIC programming)

I guess this is what I have so far. If you are an absolute beginner, I would say Arduino and Processing is a very good place to look. This is meant as a list of tools and hardware that goes one step further, where things might not be so easy and instructive (and really top notch learning tools) as Arduino and Processing. Nevertheless, with these tools, the flexibility and power of your projects can be greatly improved, not to forget, way cheaper as well. Feel free to ask any questions if anything here is unclear. Cheers!