My experiences with the PICAXE 08M2+

[lamba]

Hi friends. This is my first post on this forum. After playing around for a fair bit with the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, I finally found my way to the PICAXE. And I like it. Here's a blog post I wrote about my experience working with the PICAXE. I would love to hear your comments and feedback. Cheers.

http://puneetlamba.blogspot.com/2013/12/my-experiments-with-picaxe-08m2.html

[prenato]

Nice article lambda. I have no experience with PICAXE but do use the PIC12F683 with PicBasic programming language which is quite accessible. Started playing with Arduino's recently and have to concur with your observation that there's a lot more help and example code for the Arduino than any other of these platforms (Raspberry Pi being a close second). Given that I can get Arduinos dirt cheap on ebay, I'm not missing the PICs anymore and might use them only when the Arduino or Raspberry Pi is really an overkill for a small application. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[dannyf]

What's the advantage of picaxe vs. pic?

[Maxlor]

What's the advantage of picaxe vs. pic?

As far as I understand, you get a simple BASIC toolchain with the PICAXE (with some peripheral libraries, like the Arduino), and there's a bootloader that accepts programs over a serial interface (as opposed to the PICs ICSP.) Hardwarewise, the PICAXEs are rebranded PICs.

Lamba: why did you choose the PICAXE?

[lamba]

Thanks Paulo!

Maxlor, I chose the PICAXE because of the slightly better accessibility relative to the PIC (and it was recommended by Charles Platt in his awesome book "Make: Electronics"). But essentially, I wanted to see how much I can get done with a bare bones chip rather than a bulky board-based micro-controller like the Arduino. My current favorites are the Nano (quite small, costs just $7, is breadboard friendly, and is just as easy to work with as the Uno). My next experiment is the ATtiny85V chip because I believe it's still fairly easy to work with (it can be programmed via a regular Arduino and has many of the same capabilities as the Arduino -- many programs written for the Arduino can easily be modified to work on the ATtiny), costs just $2.50, and is of course breadboard friendly.

[dannyf]

With an out-board programmer, you can use your Aruidno environment to write / compile the code and burn to a bare bone avr chip - even with internal oscillators. No need for a board.

The same holds true for PIC (vs. picaxe - highly over-priced in my view).

[MrAureliusR]

I'd have to second the idea of PICAXE being overpriced. Seriously, C is very easy, and PICs are very cheap. I really don't get Arduino and PICaxe. At least Arduino is slightly C, but who the heck programs in BASIC anymore?

Crazy.

[cravenhaven]

I think you'll find that the PICAXE environment is primarily aimed at the education market and those who are beginning (or returning) on the electronics/microcomputer path, but they also have value for quick and very easy development for small projects. Most readers on this forum probably have a very good understanding of programming and MCU's and dismiss anything programmed in basic as very ordinary and when you look at code size and speed you would be absolutely correct, but it is very easy to dismiss the simple products as not useful.
For a first time user with minimal electronics skills and no programming skills they can set themselves up with a PICAXE 08m2 for about $3.50 and a serial cable (or just about any USB to serial cable) for a couple of dollars, a battery and a 2 resistors and everything else is free. You can even write your whole program, run it on the simulator, change inputs and watch outputs without buying anything. There is a very friendly and helpful forum with users ranging from beginners to skilled engineers.

Compare that to the PIC world. You have to learn a non-intuitive IDE (think beginners here), buy a PIC (about $2.50 at element14), a programmer/debugger such as PICKIT for $50+ and then study the datasheets etc to try and make anything work.

Have a look, you might be surprised 

[VK5RC]

While I like the idea of the simple and cheap PIC path, a $5 PIC chip can do a lot BUT the programmer/debugger/programming environment I found very confusing. I learnt a bit of assembly, some Basic and quite a bit of frustration!
I used a PICaxe to programme a microwave frequency source and it was quite a bit more friendly to learn however the online support for both hardware bits and software for Arduino (or compatible) is enormous. If you want to do something relatively quickly, a quick search in Arduino I have found someone else has done the hard yards and I can scoot in on their coat tails! (I am a lazy sod)

I could write my own simple software very quickly with Arduino (and it worked across Mac and PC) and have something working in short time.
BUT I think you will probably need to have some experience in all 3 as not one is dominating (unfortunately).
regards Rob

[prenato]

All these platforms have their place and if they help bring someone into electronics, they are doing the job. That said, if I was asked by a beginner, I would say that Arduino is the way to go these days. Basic can get the job done, but C/C++ is a much more common language in the industry and I see it at work all the time. You will be developing a more marketable skill. Couple that with the huge user community and existing code to do pretty much anything, and it's hard to beat. Also, I don't find BASIC that much easier to learn than the C "flavor" in the Arduino, so might as well learn C for a similar effort.

[thejosheb]

I'm definitely what you would call a beginner, and I started into the hobby a few months ago to make myself an aquarium controller. I wanted a little bit more power and speed then the Arduinos can provide so I went with the chipKit Max32. Its an "Arduino compatible" PIC32 microcontroller, and to start out it was great. Now I use "Arduino compatible" in the loosest sense possible, and pretty much everything that is made/programmed for Arduino will not work with chipKit straight out of the box or ever. I'm an electrician by trade and work a lot with PLC's so I'm not new to programming but I've never done any like C/C++ in the past, and the prefabbed libraries and such made learning the basics of C easier. I was able to then take that knowledge and start using MPIDE X with some relative success.
I going to go right ahead and say that chipKit is not where its at. There's no community for them, the IDE is a cludge, if you need something more then an ATMEGA then you probably know what you're doing, and a dummied down version won't cut it. But the Arduino approach to electronics is definitely helpful. At least it really helped me get my feet wet.