12-08-2012, 07:05 PM
Alan, you really are grumpy about this 
Already, more than 200,000 have been sold. Production is currently ~4000 units a day. Yes, there was the initial demand, and it remains to be seen how the sales keep going over the next year, but what separates this from all the other SBCs (all of which are aimed at the industrial sectors, unlike the Pi) is the community behind it. Take 10 minutes to investigate this yourself - don't just take my word for it.
PICs very definitely have their place, as do AVRs, which many people prefer - AVRs have the benefit of being a much later design, so some of the idiosyncrasies that PICs have inherited from their original incarnation back in the 1970s aren't present in the AVRs. PIC development was horrible if you used the tools provided by Microchip, but it's easy to create a good text IDE using freeware, as I've detailed on my website. As stated, I really like the assembly language - only ~30 instructions to learn, and it's actually pretty elegant. For the sorts of projects I've used them for, they've been perfect - anything more sophisticated would have been overkill. Of course, in industry, most people use C or worse, but that's because it's expensive to programme properly. Don't start me on Arduinos!
Cheers,
Mark
Already, more than 200,000 have been sold. Production is currently ~4000 units a day. Yes, there was the initial demand, and it remains to be seen how the sales keep going over the next year, but what separates this from all the other SBCs (all of which are aimed at the industrial sectors, unlike the Pi) is the community behind it. Take 10 minutes to investigate this yourself - don't just take my word for it.
PICs very definitely have their place, as do AVRs, which many people prefer - AVRs have the benefit of being a much later design, so some of the idiosyncrasies that PICs have inherited from their original incarnation back in the 1970s aren't present in the AVRs. PIC development was horrible if you used the tools provided by Microchip, but it's easy to create a good text IDE using freeware, as I've detailed on my website. As stated, I really like the assembly language - only ~30 instructions to learn, and it's actually pretty elegant. For the sorts of projects I've used them for, they've been perfect - anything more sophisticated would have been overkill. Of course, in industry, most people use C or worse, but that's because it's expensive to programme properly. Don't start me on Arduinos!
Cheers,
Mark
