Yes I finally did it

[M0BSW]

I'm so pleased with myself, my wife thinks I've gone mad, I wrote  a hex file, loaded it up to a pic chip and the bugger works, ok it's only flashing a led, but it's my first, racing towards 60 years old , it's made my day.
I'll calm down now

[dannyf]

racing towards 60 years old

You are only a baby,

Let's the fun begin!

I am the opposite of you. I learned about mcus on some intel chips mcs-51 many moons ago. My biggest achievement then was to code transcoders with those chips for optical encoders that we sold to steel mills.

Did nothing after that, and then I became an accidental shareholder in a friend's firm that specializes in providing design services for a particular niche where mcus are heavily used (mostly 32-bit mcus). I am still an unpaid employee of the firm allowing me access to tools and conferences, etc.

Pretty happy getting back to mcus.

[GiskardReventlov]

Hey congrats! I just reached the same milestone and know how it feels. To me it was a lot better than buying a premade kit and taking the cookie-cutter approach. I compiled the binutils, the cross-compiler and the libc, plus the programmer (avrdude). My next thing will be to hook up the oscilloscope to various things on the breadboard just as an exploratory.

[M0BSW]

Hey congrats! I just reached the same milestone and know how it feels. To me it was a lot better than buying a premade kit and taking the cookie-cutter approach. I compiled the binutils, the cross-compiler and the libc, plus the programmer (avrdude). My next thing will be to hook up the oscilloscope to various things on the breadboard just as an exploratory.

Congrats to you too, it's opened a whole new world for me, There are loads of amateur radio projects that use pic chips,  :-happy days. 

[uwezi]

It was some time in the summer of 2010. Now I am teaching microcontrollers...

Welcome to the club!

[Mechatrommer]

I compiled the binutils, the cross-compiler and the libc, plus the programmer (avrdude).

well, compiling all that is moon to earth milestones. congratulation!

[Refrigerator]

Awesome! Can't wait to start loading programs to my mcus when i get them.

[GiskardReventlov]

well, compiling all that is moon to earth milestones. congratulation!

In case someone needs to know one issue with gcc was that I tried to build it in the source tree. Instead it's required to do this:

cd gcc
mkdir mybuild
../configure
make