Wednesday 17 October 2012

Oshonsoft v Sourceboost

Well, it's a sad day at Nerd Towers, as we've had to wave goodbye to our favourite PIC compiler, Oshonsoft's PIC18 Simulator - for the next few projects at least.

It's a great compiler, the best simulator bar none, makes USB/HID coding a doddle, but - sadly - it's lack of support means we've started to outgrow it. The number of chips supported is starting to look a little thin, now we've discovered these great little PICs - 16F1825

The thing is, to use some of the newer Microchips, we're going to have to use a different compiler. MPLAB (even version X) is still a mess and difficult to use (not to mention sloooow) so we've been looking at alternatives. Jason from BuildBrighton suggested SourceBoost which, at £60 for a full licence, looks pretty good value.

Now here's the dilemma:
Stick with a BASIC-based compiler for USB/HID and switch between languages/compilers for other stuff, or slowly upgrade everything to a C-based compiler/language and leave Oshonsoft behind for good?




Posted by Chris at 13:16
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3 comments:

  1. Al17 October 2012 at 15:15

    Switch to C, you won't regret it and it'll set you up for doing professional embedded work (if you want to go down that route).

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    Replies
    1. Chris18 October 2012 at 00:58

      Hi Al,
      I used to do a lot of professional embedded work, first in assembly then later with BASIC (I migrated to PICs from PLCs nearly 20 years ago). I actually quite like the way BASIC keeps you quite close to the hardware layer; I tend to work a lot from first principles and don't like relying on pre-built libraries and functions (I never got on with Arduino for this reason).

      I'm not knocking Oshonsoft, and I've built a couple of commercial products with it (the compiler actually created smaller/tighter .hex files than Hi-Tech C complier a few years back). It's just that it's not really kept up with the Microsoft product range.

      That said, I've compiled my first C-based app (for the audio wav player project) so let's see how easy/hard it is to debug with.....

      Delete
  2. Unknown30 October 2012 at 12:40

    The great compilers sd cards are so source boost which act on the full jasons and it entire with different cards chips and circuits based upgrades.


    R4 3DS

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