New stuff

edmunds

Senior Member
Dear PICAXE team!

Every now and then, somebody asks if there is a chance of a new and improved product from PICAXE. Namely, a new chip, an improved software version or something. Now, I decided to be this somebody, since I logged onto the picaxe page after a while and I can bet the 'news' banner is at least 3 years old :).

So, do you still have a team cooking something or is the project in 'maintenance mode'?


Thank you,

Edmunds
 

inglewoodpete

Senior Member
Who knows? From past experience, there is no advance notice of new products.

What would I like to see? Perhaps a 28X3 and 40X3, based on the very flexible PIC18FxxK42. More RAM, DMA, 12-bit ADC, and I/O to/from peripherals can be directed at many alternate pins.
 

Buzby

Senior Member
Who knows? From past experience, there is no advance notice of new products.
The only new product I know of that was heavily promoted before it's release was PE6. Rev-Ed even set up a 'wish list' of what users wanted to see in the new software.

Methinks we won't have the same input into the X3 or whatever.

( Personally, I'd rather have a few fixes and enhancements to the PE6 we've got now, before any new hardware is introduced. )

Cheers,

Buzby
 

nick12ab

Senior Member
I still like to use PICAXE occasionally for simple projects that do not need much processing power or speed.

It's hard to come up with sensible suggestions when I've moved onto "professional" things that are in a completely different market to PICAXE like ATmegas and FPGAs, as obviously I'd like it to be every bit as powerful as those things, but one "sensible" thing I'd like to see is improved mathematics. I'd like to have the ability to use negative numbers or brackets in my code. Not having them is frustrating at times and I can see school students wanting those too. I'd also like 32-bit variables and proper arrays, but I don't know how useful they'd be to Rev-Ed's main market.
 

edmunds

Senior Member
Who knows? From past experience, there is no advance notice of new products.

What would I like to see? Perhaps a 28X3 and 40X3, based on the very flexible PIC18FxxK42. More RAM, DMA, 12-bit ADC, and I/O to/from peripherals can be directed at many alternate pins.
This is one of the reasons I posted the question - microchip has updated their range with drop-in replacements for the chips that fancy picaxe firmware. Given, to use some of the new stuff, there would need to be new firmware, but this must be 'next version' kind of thing, rather than coming up with a picaxe basic for STM32 :D.

The second reason is I have had to work with arduino and 32bit platforms lately for relatively small reasons on some projects. At the same time, while I got the thing done, I have been frustrated with toolchains (for 32bit) and black-box libraries (arduino) for the most part. I was hoping for a confirmation rev-ed is not in 'maintenance mode' and we have a hope of picaxe catching up. I went to the website to find no reason for hope. Thus the post.

Otherwise, it is business as usual - picaxe for everything it can be used for and classroom, look elswhere if you need 30 hw interrupts or pwm pins and real speed like running a display or some ML/AI bla bla bla :)

/Edmunds
 

edmunds

Senior Member
I still like to use PICAXE occasionally for simple projects that do not need much processing power or speed.

It's hard to come up with sensible suggestions when I've moved onto "professional" things that are in a completely different market to PICAXE like ATmegas and FPGAs, as obviously I'd like it to be every bit as powerful as those things, but one "sensible" thing I'd like to see is improved mathematics. I'd like to have the ability to use negative numbers or brackets in my code. Not having them is frustrating at times and I can see school students wanting those too. I'd also like 32-bit variables and proper arrays, but I don't know how useful they'd be to Rev-Ed's main market.
I agree about math - this has probably been the reason number one to look elsewhere. However, just adding a 'macro' style function would not solve the problem for what I'm working with. I can do that with current tools, but it is normally too slow for the kind of tasks we give micro-controllers these days.

/Edmunds
 

stan74

Senior Member
There are free pic basic compilers. google.
All will be a new learning curve but picaxe is relatively complicated for basic and non standard in flashing or variables.
All basics are different but some have things in common...pics tend to use the microchip pins for programming data/clock.
 
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