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Comment by Baliw | Hacker News Reader

Very cool stuff. I always wanted to pick up PIC embedded programming, but always had too many other things in Python to play with. Now it seems I wouldn't have to learn a new language. I wonder how well this stacks up with hand written PIC code.

What's the coolest thing you've done with a PIC?

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Why not just use a Raspberry Pi? This device doesn't actually run Python, it's just an interface between USB and I/O pins like the Bus Pirate (which is also controllable with Python).

Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't have any experience with a Raspberry Pi, but wouldn't the end result from this be able to be embedded in a much smaller form factor than a Raspberry Pi?

This looks like mainly a test board. Would one be able to take the end result of this and program a production PIC board with it?

Seems like that might be useful for smaller form factors than what a Raspberry Pi is capable of.

No. This thing doesn't do anything of use without a host PC connected over USB to control it.

If you want to write production embedded code, you have two choices: C and assembly. That's the result of my extensive research, anyway: gcj doesn't work, the AVR forth implementation uses too much flash and can brick your chip at runtime (for other reasons), etc.

You can also program 8+bit PICs in JAL, a Pascal-like language.

Definitely keep in mind that this thing needs to be connected to a host PC over USB to do anything. You are not actually programming the PIC and then having it do stuff on it's own. The pyMCU folks probably program the PIC in C or BASIC, and you would just be using the provided firmware.

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