picaxe?

Hello, I'm a noob to reprap and electronics (although we all had to start somwhere right?) and I recently discovered the picaxe pic chip. I searched these forums for picaxe and couldn't find anything.

so my question is...

has anybody thought about using a picaxe as the pic chip(s) for a reprap? or am I just a noob that isn't understanding the actual complexity of things?

The current RepRap Darwin design uses the 16F628A or 16F648A PIC. Migration to a more powerful PIC has been discussed for a future version 2.x design, probably either an 18F series PIC or dsPIC.

Note that the current RepRap Darwin electronics boards work as designed, there is no need to redesign them and the PIC firmware at this point. We have other more pressing challenges to address! Use of different PICs in a future version would be mainly to allow use of (lower cost) DC motors and shaft encoders, rather than stepppers.

If you are a newcomer, please stick with the current RepRap Darwin design :-)

Jonathan

I believe the PICAXE would be step backwards in terms of power, cost, and availability, and thus was not really examined as a possibility.

A PICAXE is basically a PIC with some extra stuff tacked on the outside to make it an "easier" beginners microcontroller. As far as I can tell it is only made in the UK so shipping other countries may be expensive. It could only be more expensive than a bare PIC. C as an embedded programming language is much more powerful than the BASIC language of a PICAXE.

What I am curious about is if there was ever a trade study (or similar) of Atmel AVRs controllers vs Microchip PICs for the reprap project?

[www.ladyada.net]

Of course with the current knowledge and code bases the PIC would be hard to beat even in future designs.

hmmm, I was just coming at this from a point of ease of reverse engenering and customisation, and from my limited experence in a third world country (I spent a month in eastern europe) I thought something that was easyer to teach the locals in concept rather that regergatate by rote would be more beneficial. what I'll prolly do is begin by the rote method with the stanard darwin, and get experence with that, then see if I can make my own with picaxe chips. as for the cost, I can get a pack of 10 for just under 50 dollars Australian, I didn't think that was to expencive, in the scheme of things.

For the future, an arduino variant (http://www.arduino.cc) might be worth looking at. Multiple board designs which are all compatible and under a CC licence

> I thought
> something that was easyer to teach the locals in
> concept rather that regergatate by rote would be
> more beneficial. what I'll prolly do is begin by
> the rote method with the stanard darwin, and get
> experence with that, then see if I can make my own
> with picaxe chips.

Sounds like a good programme.

i also think that an arduino / wiring based design would be fantastic for a v2.0 board. there is already a LARGE open source community based around it we could tap into, as well as having a language that is FANTASTIC to program in (check out wiring.org for more info)

that being said, we're definitely locked into the PIC for v1.0. v2.0 is probably 6 months off, or even a year (just a guess) when it comes time to redesign and run off the next generation pcb's, we'll have to make that decision.