After tinkering with PIC Micros for a few years and having mixed results and plenty of stress times, I dropped upon the world of Arduino. I thought to myself ‘hmmmmm, this looks very interesting’. It has similar (if not more/improved) features to the range of PIC’s I’d been using, comes with it’s own development board (you can get the chip on it’s own to integrate in your own circuit) and it’s a completely open source platform. So, all the hardware designs and software IDE is free to use and play with as you wish.
I instantly decided to pack away the PICKit2 and ICSP ZIF Adaptor boards and put an Arduino UNO on my birthday list (which just happened to be 2 weeks away). We’ll have to see what comes of it, but I have a few projects planned including making my own LCD shield complete with a 4-way button pad and a couple of other buttons (GameBoy stylee). I already have all the components, now just need to find the time…