Sorry Picaxe but I'm leaving you for someone new

fernando_g

Senior Member
"Well I'm sticking with my 6C4s" That's a low-mu triode, correct?

Returning to the Picaxe. There is not much more that I may add that has not been said already. I'm also very glad that I found this wonderful platform, it helped my poor analog brain to add significant capabilities to my projects.

I'm very much into AC power management, and syncing zero crossings while performing other tasks is a significant challenge. What I have done is to use a pair of Picaxes, one to perform the actual control and the other for housekeeping.
Not the most elegant solution but it works.
 

premelec

Senior Member
@fernando_g yep - two per flip-flop [and you could even get two within the same glass envelope] and the marvelous CK722 came along - and tunnel diodes went down some tunnel - so many wonders and I would be happy with a PICAXE that was faster and had small arrays and floating point maths etc... I used fancy BASICs over decades and my sometime perversion is trying to see how much can be done with so little - hence PICAXE [assembly? I'm not _that_ perverse...]. Power management is a great thing to be interested in and micros are micro power... and going lower. 0 degF this morn so I'm logged on - wood stove.
 

HertzHog

Member
My last project was really simple in concept but look a lot of compromise and complexity to work round 16 bit integer limitations. It really needed a 32 bit floating point maths ability.
However, I love Picaxe for being so small and easily battery powered.
 

oracacle

Senior Member
I am a little confused at the hatred for the FPU. While it adds a componenet to the circuit it does bring a wealth of abilities amd go be doing things while the CPU is off doing something else (multi tasking any one) it comes with it own 2 channel 12 bit ADC, handles signed numbers decimals and go do things FFT and logs.

its takes a while to get your head around it, same as anything else but its seems to be needlesly shunned by people un willing to give it a chance. This is further not helped by the poorly writen documents that micro mega proveide (the test code has an un ending number of errors that have to be corrected before you get started). I did write a document that goes some way to attempt to bridge that cap but i have not gotten to s place where i have tryed everything it able to do - the IDE does a long way to filling any gaps that people have with writing the code that it need for operation
 

Buzby

Senior Member
My thoughts are not so much 'hatred' of the FPU, it's more of 'why do we need an FPU when an X3 could do the job easily ?'.

The FPU does have a steep learning curve and poor support, which is exactly the opposite of PICAXE. Now I'm not frightened of a bit of new learning, but I abhore using two chips when one will do, so if I really need FP I don't use PICAXE.
 

Goeytex

Senior Member
I am a little confused at the hatred for the FPU.
Where does "hatred" come in?. The use of the word "hatred" is over-the-top, completely absurd, and intellectually dishonest .

You can't even have a discussion/debate these days whether it be politics, world events, or microcontrollers without someone being called a "hater" for having an opposing opinion.

Ridiculous.
 

Dippy

Moderator
Goeytex didn't say he 'hated' the FPU.
He simply stated that he would sooner stab himself (repeatedly) in the face before using one - which is neither over-the-top nor absurd as it is his personal opinion.

I, too, would choose another platform rather than strapping secondary items on.
But it usually comes down to whether the person can be bothered, or has the patience or capability or time, to learn yet another language/IDE/programming method.
I simply choose whichever method is the most suitable and get on with it.
 

Goeytex

Senior Member
Goeytex didn't say he 'hated' the FPU.
He simply stated that he would sooner stab himself (repeatedly) in the face before using one - which is neither over-the-top nor absurd as it is his personal opinion.
Even more accurately I stated, "I would stab myself in the face (repeatedly) before adding a Micromega FPU to a Picaxe in order to get 64-bit maths/ floating point support. .

There are times that I have indeed used an FPU for math intensive applications where we needed to take the math load off of the MCU to let it do the "glue logic" and I/O stuff while not getting bogged down with cpu intensive maths.

Hanging an FPU off of a Picaxe is another story.
 

oracacle

Senior Member
I didn't say that geoytex hated the fpu

actually it was a general question, this isn't the only place I have seen people whine, and in fact hate the FPU. It does also intrigue me how you came to the conclusion that I was assuming any here hated it - after all assumption is the mother of all **** ups and makes an ass out of u and me.
 

jims

Senior Member
Is it just me...or does anyone else think that this has gone "over the top". Seems as if there's not much technical content now.
JimS
 

Hendriks

Member
Maybe not, I fully agree with Matherp.
Now I started with Micromite because it is the next step in moving forward.

But I am not happy with using two platforms.
It would have been much more comfortable if Picaxe provided a X3 or whatever you want to call it.

Now with Micromite I must get used to a new platform while I really wanted to stay with Picaxe.

Moving to Micromite altogether is no option either; I am not going to use a PIC32 for a 555 timer application. Speaking about over the top...
 

julianE

Senior Member
A heads up, I ordered a Micromite to give it a whirl, turns out there is an Mk2 version which I learned after making my purchase.

Unlike the title of this thread I will not be leaving Picaxe, more of a fling, in American colloquialism, "a little strange".
 

srnet

Senior Member
This thread was over the top when it was started.
Indeed.

I am sure Rev Ed are happy to receive ideas for future products, even when these ideas will have occurred to them also.

But why do so many people think (or appear to) that Rev Ed dont understand the market for their own products ?
 

Goeytex

Senior Member
Indeed.

I am sure Rev Ed are happy to receive ideas for future products, even when these ideas will have occurred to them also.

But why do so many people think (or appear to) that Rev Ed dont understand the market for their own products ?
I don't know.

I don't know Rev Ed financials, state of new product development, new product development budget, or forward looking market plans.

What I do know, (or at least I think I do), is that Rev Ed is a relatively small private company with just a handful of employees, with a niche market that is primarily educational institutions. My guess is that Rev Ed's main profit center lies in educational sales of M2 products. The private hobby market is probably a much smaller percentage of sales compared to educational. I doubt that X2 sales are a driving factor, but certainly could be wrong. Rev Ed is not transparent in these matters for obvious reasons.

How much financial sense would it make to spend a lot of money and resources on developing a super duper Picaxe based upon a 32-bit PIC? How many units would need to be sold and at what price point to make a reasonable profit? Thousands for sure. Is the market really there considering the current competition already in place?

It is not so simple as many folks seem to think.
 

womai

Senior Member
The question to ask for Rev-Ed actually is, what is the incremental size of the market compared to the effort developing a new product?

There are MANY applications the Picaxe can cover as everyone here is probably well aware of. Also the learning curve is very easy - usually just a few minutes before you have your first LED flashing, and many advanced things are amazingly simple to get running on a Picaxe (try implementing an I2C slave on a raw PIC if you want a comparison, for example). The major shortcomings in my opinion are program structure (no arrays, no user defined functions or parameter passing, etc.), execution speed, and advanced data types and arithmetic (32-bit integers, floating point, strings). But the main market for Rev-Ed does not really need any of this, and many other projects work fine without it as well (or can use workarounds). If the workarounds get too tedious it's time to move up, but again no size will fit all. Some will want to retain some measure of simplicity and choose Micromite, Arduino or similar. Some will chose raw PICs (myself included) or some other bare 8/16/32-bit microcontroller, e.g. some ARM Cortex based offering (in that case, forget "simplicity"). Others will prefer a full-blown computer system like a Raspberry Pi. And so on. So even if Rev-Ed offered SOME system, most people would choose something else in the end. It's just natural that you progress and continue to other things, but on the other hand there is also a steady stream of "new blood" happy with being introduced to microcontrollers in an easy and painful way through the Picaxe (speaking of experience here - I rarely use Picaxe anymore but will never forget it was through the Picaxe I got my entry into embedded programming and design, and keep pointing beginners into that direction, including my own son).

As for the Micromite, as this was the opening of the thread, it is indeed a cute system but won't fit everyone either I suspect since running interpreted Basic it is quite slow (from what I know not much faster than a Picaxe)...

As an aside, I greatly appreciate the very civilized discourse on this forum, which is a major reason a keep returning here, it's very pleasant compared to other forums I am member of. A controversial topic like this would have resulted in mudslinging and name calling after about the second post on most other forums I know!

At least that's my 2 cents.
 

srnet

Senior Member
The question to ask for Rev-Ed actually is, what is the incremental size of the market compared to the effort developing a new product?
Yes and as a commercial company its obviously reasonable to assume they have considered that.
 

Hemi345

Senior Member
Since Rev-Ed has PE6 pretty much nailed down and is probably doing minor bug fixes now, what are they working on next? Maybe they're extremely busy filling orders, or burning the bootloader onto each chip one by one, or negotiating a large purchases with Toyota designing their next vehicle around a PICAXE 08M2. haha Or maybe they're tired and plan to just ride out what they currently have till retirement.

I guess we can all speculate on what we think they need to do or should do for the "hobby sector" but visit http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/ and see what else they do. "Providers of custom microcontroller and software solutions for commercial and educational applications". The hobby part of their company could be a very small portion of what else they do and quite possibly a 'side business' for them. By avoiding these types of discussions either voluntarily or under orders, they could be simply protecting their company's commercial product business that isn't available to the hobbyist. "Why give everyone the tools to easily do something advanced, when people can pay us to do it for them" type of approach. To which, I don't blame them, but it sure would be nice to have floating point math in the PICAXE line :cool:
 

techElder

Well-known member
I do wish we could not keep speaking of this MicroMite type of product as if it were a mature product. It works fine, but I wouldn't compare it to the maturity of the PICAXE product line. For one thing, it doesn't have a dedicated editor (let alone an IDE.) Good grief! We're on the sixth version of the PICAXE editor! Think of all the features that have been added from this community's requests!

The best editor for the MM is a freebie that was written years ago. Yes, the MM also contains its own editor ... circa 1979 version.

And it appears that the MM program contains all of the source (tokenized to some extent) including all of the comments for the source. Since there isn't a dedicated editor for the MM, there doesn't seem to be any way to separate the programming from the line-by-line commentary.

Of course there are significant features that I would like to see in the PICAXE, too.

I'm not going to throw out all of the goodies of my editor to do it, though.
 

Hendriks

Member
Exactly, the editor/simulator is one of the reasons why Picaxe is my first choise.
If Picaxe would create a higher end controller we wouldn't have this discussion would we?
I for one would be very happy to have my projects on one and the same platform.

Why is this discussions coming back to marketing strategy again and again? It is not our job to discuss whether there is a market for the product or not.
We only need to express what WE would like to buy.
 
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srnet

Senior Member
I doubt that X2 sales are a driving factor, but certainly could be wrong. Rev Ed is not transparent in these matters for obvious reasons.

How much financial sense would it make to spend a lot of money and resources on developing a super duper Picaxe based upon a 32-bit PIC? How many units would need to be sold and at what price point to make a reasonable profit? Thousands for sure. Is the market really there considering the current competition already in place?

It is not so simple as many folks seem to think.
I would also doubt that X2 sales form a significant part of their business.

Of course, there are a minority of users who would appreciate an X3 or X4 (me included) but given the development and supports costs, does it make economic sense for Rev Ed to take the risk ?

And if the competition is 'free' or 'open source' how can a commercial company compete ?
 

womai

Senior Member
Why is this discussions coming back to marketing strategy again and again?
Because people keep asking why Rev-Ed isn't developing/offering some feature or porting the system to some more advanced microcontroller. And that indeed comes down (apart from obvious manpower limitations every company has) to marketing strategy and their chosen target market, so this is given as an explanation. What is behind these discussions (that as Dippy pointed out crop up with great regularity) is that while many Picaxe users eventually develop more advanced skills and needs (thanks to Picaxe based introduction!), the main target audience for the Picaxe (education, and probably to a much lesser extent hobbyists) does NOT change as there is a constant influx of new students every year.

To put it differently, nobody is asking primary schools to adapt their curriculum towards university level courses just because their audience from a few years ago has developed to that point - it's understood that primary schools ("Picaxe") always cater to young children of each year and the advanced stuff is covered by secondary schools ("Arduino" etc.), universities etc. ("Cortex M...", etc.). Not a 100% fitting example because one CAN do a lot of quite advanced stuff with the Picaxe, just not each and every application you can think of.
 

Hendriks

Member
You are probably right. Nevertheless, the first page of PICAXE.COM recognizes hobbyists as a significant customer group:
What Is PICAXE?
PICAXE SystemA PICAXE microcontroller is designed to be the brain of your electronic project. Originally designed as an educational system for schools, the PICAXE system has now also been widely adopted by hundreds of thousands of 'hobbyists' due to its ease of use...
So maybe our opion counts for something too :)
 
You are probably right. Nevertheless, the first page of PICAXE.COM recognizes hobbyists as a significant customer group:

So maybe our opion counts for something too :)
The incorporation of commands for I2C, SPI and high speed serial must be confirmation that the hobbyist is an important market sector for Rev Ed. I think it is unlikely that these commands would be used by educational establishments

At the risk of reigniting a discussion of a day or so ago, I love the FPU! OK it's only 32 bit floating point but that is enough for me. Without it I would either have had to tackle another processor and language or more likely devise some less satisfactory work around.

A Happy New Year,

Richard
 

Dippy

Moderator
"Without it I would either have had to tackle another processor and language"
Exactly the point I made last year.
But most people realise that, if you can tackle another processor/IDE, having it 'on-board' is way better - but requires extra effort/expense.

Having I2C etc. makes the PICAXE suitable for education AND hobby etc.
Rev-Ed would really lose a chunk if they actively ignored that.

I'm sure Rev-Ed know what they're doing and for all I know there may be something in the pipeline...
 

John West

Senior Member
The PICAXE got me into microcontrollers, and I'll use it everywhere it's suitable because it's cheap and easy to use. I'm introducing my students to it because it's the very best way to get them into microcontrollers, as well. Very importantly, this forum is the very best place to get answers to numerous problems with microcontroller code and circuits, but only if that microcontroller is a PICAXE, so the group here can use the expertise they have with the chips to solve people's problems. That support is the very best reason to use a PICAXE. As these are educational products, and education means increased knowledge and capability it is not only a possibility that one will outgrow use of the PICAXE for sophisticated projects, but something to be hoped for. It means one has graduated. Then they are in a good position to teach others about microcontrollers, starting with the PICAXE.
 

srnet

Senior Member
I'm sure Rev-Ed know what they're doing and for all I know there may be something in the pipeline...
This debate, which crops up often, starts with some posters assuming that Rev Ed do not know what they are doing and do not understand the market for their products. I recall one comment (some time back) that Rev Ed would die if they did not compete with the Arduino ...........

Its is also interesting that there seems to be an expectation that Rev Ed should (must ?) compete with products that are free, the Micromite which is the subject of this thread and of course the Arduino, or even Great Cow basic which is also free.
 
I started off with Arduino, and yes it is a great system, and very powerful when compared to picaxe, and yes you can buy very cheap clones on ebay which work very well. But that is nowhere near the whole story, picaxe is much more beginner friendly, and I feel that it allows progress much quicker thanks to the simpler programming, I also think that the forum support is better for beginners (like me) I have never had anything but friendly support on this forum so far, a contrast to the arduino forums, where the "elders of the internet" will berate "silly" beginners and send them off on a never ending quest to frustration, often in the process typing more words than would have been required for a direct solution.

I feel that I have made much more progress in several weeks with picaxe than I have with 18 months of arduino, and arduino is marketed to be for non technical people, not bashing arduino, but it is not as simple is all I am saying.

Also I feel that using the right thing for the right job is key here, if you just want to do a simple and quick project then a small picaxe is clearly a better choice, for more advanced things then a bigger picaxe or arduino is the way to go, for very sophisticated stuff then the more powerful (and expensive) arduino or other single board systems are required.

And of course if there is no reason to then why limit yourself to one brand of microcontroller/devboard? The more you learn the better, right? As said already horses for courses!
 

tiscando

Senior Member
Agreed. I started programming PICAXEs back in 2008, still at high school (in the bad old days when ICT class only taught how to use Powerpoint and Access) with absolutely no prior programming experience, and the manuals and BASIC language were incredibly intuitive and the PICAXEs were a doddle to program. I later branched out to MPLABX and Raspberry Pi, but I still have 5 PICAXEs powered and running 24/7, with another one on the back of a Raspberry Pi about to come on-line controlling a solar thermal system. I often find it easier to write reliable control programs in PICAXE than in MPLAB.

(Sorry, just realised its an old thread)
 
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tommo_NZ

New Member
Not just an advert, but very close to blatant spam for a non-Rev Ed product.

Sometimes I think members here forget than this is a forum about, and funded by, a specific manufacturer to support their product. I'm amazed at the tolerance shown to brief forays into discussions about competing products, but a post running to many paragraphs extolling the virtues of a competing product seems bang out of order to me (and I did read it before it was deleted and go and look at the rather meagre offering of the supposed competition, particularly the rather poor documentation).
I completely agree with you, and feel quite passionately about this, well strongly then. Of course one can't expect a competing product to be promoted on a RevEd sponsored site. It is obvious that there are more capable and advanced products available, stupid to think otherwise, but PicAxe very adequately fills a spot in the market and when ones skills advance one can move on. But I don't see the need to denigrate or hilite perceived short comings in a product, it is what it is, it works.
My personal situation is that as an old fart approaching 70 and with failing memory but not enthusiasm, PicAxe has helped me to stay alert and focused. I am still learning, and the intricacies of dec to BCD conversion, serial comms, communicating with RTC modules etc are enough to wake me early in the morning with a smile on my face, anticipating applying a solution to some problem that I went to sleep with. I am grateful for the fact that PicAxe exists, it is affordable, and it works! and I am grateful for the forum and members for the almost unlimited range of tips and solutions.
/ End Rant.
 

stan74

Senior Member
Picaxe is great for learning about pics and many users are happy.
I can't get on with c++ but use another free basic compiler to program arduinos and pics.
This is a real compiler and not an interpreter so code runs 100 times faster than picaxe.
I erased my 28x2 and can now use all it's 18f25k22 features.
Thanks picaxe it was FUN using picaxe but running out of named variables and using peek/poke and seeing how using a glcd for graphics was too slow I also moved on.
For a 64 year old hobbyist the FUN aspect of picaxe was great.
There is definitely a loyal picaxe following. like you can't teach old dogs new tricks... I could learn c++...nah
New 8bit pics have programmable pins...cool but a pain to set up.. and you have to. So I use uno/nano 328p...nice 8 bit chip
 

lbenson

Senior Member
... like you can't teach old dogs new tricks... I could learn c++...nah ...
No point in being denigrating. I taught myself C when Small-C for the Intel 8080, by Ron Cain, appeared in the May 1980 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. I wrote a number of lessons in C++ for McGraw Hill's home education courses. For me, PICAXE is the new trick. PICAXE is still good for a lot of things, including teaching newcomers. Obviously, interest has dropped off, as shown by the decreasing number of posts. The PICAXE forum remains a valuable resource.

As the no-longer-with-us Dippy used to say, horses for courses.
 

stan74

Senior Member
If c++ was easy, then since there's code examples for every device and data sheet code examples are c++ everyone would use c++.
I learnt basic as my first programming language cos early home computers came with a basic interpreter.
After 1985 pc's like amstrad came out running dos but still had basic.
I had c on sinclair and early amstrad z80 but found it too hard.
I guess asking what matherp uses now is not allowed. Few free options if wanting to use basic
 

tmfkam

Senior Member
I like the BASIC language, it suits my thought process well.

I understand C and I include C++ in that, but I still prefer BASIC. I spent many years coding for Windows, using Borland's Delphi, witing many thousands of lines of Pascal code, full GUI Windows programs, custom DLLs and System wide 'Hooks'. If I could program my microprocessors using a Pascal compiler I would. I understand MikroElectronic (I think that is how they spell it...) do a Pascal compiler for PIC processors, but I've never been able to persuade a copy of that to work reliably on the computers I tried, and there is (or was) no Mac version. I've never got any version of MpLab to work correctly either although that is probably down to my lack of understanding of the concept of the 'Projects' that it requires. I also found that it failed to recognise the installed compilers I had (supposedly) installed and so rarely, if ever, compiled any of my 'projects' giving errors that I was unable to decipher and so unable to correct.

PicAxe takes all that away. I can enter a program, "compile" it, and download it into the target device in the time it takes to Google MpLab's current error message. And it works on Mac too.

I love the program simulation of PicAxe (though that doesn;t work for Mac sadly, shame!) it shortens development time massively.

I love PicAxe and for those projects where a PicAxe processor is the right choice, will continue to use it. For those projects where the base PIC is the right choice, I'll use a similar BASIC compiler, but that won't kill my enthusiasm for PicAxe., or the BASIC language.
 
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