Picaxe vs PIC and compiler

[cschuerm]

I *love* my 11C and 16C!  Can't imagine living without RPN.
Also, PIC assembler really isn't bad at all.  Although I certainly agree that the Mot 68k line is far richer and has a beautiful architecture, I've become good friends with PIC assembler and haven't found it to be a headache to program at all.  Used to do a LOT of Z80 (bless Rodney Zaks) and it was always enjoyable too.  The only micro I really hated was the 6502!
Chris

[BruceM]

It looks like I can manage with the Pixaxe basic for my battery charge controller (PV, Wind, Lister), but of the compilers I was most impressed with the Swordfish structured Basic, though it is only for the 18F pic parts.  It has native floating point (no library calls).  On a budget I'd pick BoostC.

It seems to work out best, software wise, to have the state of charge (SOC) calculation be fixed time based, off the Picaxe polled interupt feature and timer driven by an I2C clock chip.  Then the other control of the charge process can be state logic coded, and not all driven by a fixed frame rate.  With all software driven by a fixed frame rate (instead of just SOC), all the "what state we're in" information must be flagged and then on every pass through the software, the state information would be referenced to determine which sections of code get run.

I'm still thinking about conserving power by going into processor sleep mode at night when there is no load and (no wind or batteries are full).  Then I can wake the processor every 15 seconds or so, using the I2C clock chip to remember true time since the onboard sleep timing is sloppy and not temperature corrected.

The devil's always in the details!