Yet another long-time senior member of the community checking in (the forum was such a great read years ago, so many fascinating projects and discussions), god I can't believe it's been 15 years since the M2 chips came out, I remember being so excited for them, and it seemed like X3 or M3 series would inevitably be out a few years later. These days I've generally moved on to Raspberry Silicon chips (RP2040 and RP2350), both with micropython for simple projects, and the arduino core from Earle Philhower. My local community college has recently made the same transition away from PICAXE in favor of the Raspberry Silicon offerings.
I'm still really nostalgic for the PICAXE family, but these days I find that the limitations of BASIC get in the way more often than they help, and the lack of any updates to the hardware for well over a decade doesn't help either. I did enjoy the challenge of the resource limitations, and still find myself occasionally doing a project that ends up using a PICAXE if I already have some old hardware that's set up well for it.
Aside from a total rewrite to make a similar firmware that runs MicroPython instead of BASIC, I'm not sure exactly what the solution is though, but it seems generally that something needs to change if PICAXE wants to stay relevant. Or maybe a way that the BASIC could be integrated inline with direct compiled C or Python? There's interesting approaches that could be possible, but I'm guessing Rev-Ed doesn't have the resources to build something like that these days. If they ever do eventually close and discontinue selling the PICAXE chips or maintaining the software, I hope they'll at least open source the projects to benefit the community.
Edit with a couple additional thoughts: One niche that I find PICAXE chips particularly well suited for, in a way that few more popular modern microcontrollers are, is in their ability to be used with small simple chips (such as the 08M2), that need very little support circuitry and tolerate a wide range of voltages. Personally my dream IC for a lot of projects would be 08M2 sized, with native i2c slave support (memory-mapped to scratchpad or similar like on the X2 chips would be perfect), and the ability to program them directly over USB with various languages. I guess that's kinda more just describing the Raspberry Silicon again with those latter criteria, but that's a big part of why they've been such a big hit in modern projects. Meanwhile they definitely don't meet those former criteria, they're much more particular with their recommended/required voltage regulators, a required set of passives (including an odd custom polarized inductor), external flash chip, etc. A PICAXE meanwhile needs what? A vaguely smooth voltage source and a single pull down resistor. Of course ultimately that's more a trait of the underlying PIC, but still, I think the PICAXE concept could hold a lot of potential still for some more modernized hardware, even if it also needs a bit of a paradigm shift for the software to fully keep up.
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