[DiogenesLamp]

We could have fun as neighbors.

I expect that is true. :)

PICs are an interesting breed. Its a pug-ugly instruction set; however, it seems to be shockingly efficient. Programs are always very small when compared to the same application on another processor. They are also very rugged and dirt cheap.

I *HATE* PIC's instruction set and weird architecture, but you are right, they are very cheap, they work well, and that's why I use them in a lot of the stuff I make.

I have long preferred assembly, but in the last couple of years i've started writing in C++. I've been using the DSPPIC33fj128. It's instruction set is too massive and it's architecture too full of peculiarities to bother trying to do it in assembly.

I like C well enough, and i've gotten them to work pretty well doing various things.

One of the things I had worked on and gotten working decently is sending audio long distance (several miles) through the 900 mhz ISM band, using the RFM69HCW transciever module. The intent was to use it as a voting receiver system for a Fire Department with multiple stations acting as remote receiver sites.

All the audio was to be routed to a central controller that decided which received audio signal would be sent out through the repeater.

The whole things was relatively cheap compared to what you could buy commercially, and with no reoccurring phone line costs, which is the normal way to implement a voting receiver system, or at least it used to be. I'm not sure what people are doing now.

My main work has been in radio communications.

[GingisK]

I have a radio project that I had to put on hold. Now it has to wake up, since the client is getting anxious. I have the boards already made but not populated. It uses an ATSAML11E16 and a Microchip RN2903, LoRaWAN in the 915MHz band. It must ship for the 868MHz band, there being a pin compatible device. This project started off using a Seeed Studio radio; however, that had availability issues as well as being cantankerous.

I'm not fond of radio projects.

The Seeed-based project hit the skids when I tried to take the application software inside the radio. That turned out to be hell on earth. Long term plans are to move the application into a Microchip radio. They give better support than Seeed, so the idea seems feasible.

I used assembly for over fifteen years following graduation in 1972. I've used it on many different processors and architectures. I usually use C, but always use assembly whenever that is best. I fashioned a Arduino-like pin I/O library to be used on a PIC using assembler. Sometimes it is useful to refer to pins using a simple integer rather than the instructions, particularly for table-driven C applications.