@Lwasserman Is there a disadvantage to using Arduinos?

@proto_azure No. I was trained on Motorolla 68HC12s, and later used PIC chips. I see Arduinos, and the snotty, rotten part of my brain screams, "Damn hobbyists!" There is nothing wrong with Arduinos. My only problem is that I went to school for embedded controls, and am being fussy.

@proto_azure That said, I highly recommend that you take the time to understand your pinouts, peripheral circuits, and assembly code, as opposed to just using shields and premade libraries. I really believe that it's good to know why something works.

@Lwasserman later on I'm going to use the PIC32 for my engineering courses. Those aren't as easy to use, are they?

@proto_azure They're not that different. Let me look up the 32 series. I haven't messed with those.

@proto_azure Microcontrollers or microprocessors? Apparently the PIC32's have both types of chips.

@Lwasserman microcontrollers

@proto_azure So, they have several options for 32-bit microcontrollers. One that I pulled up claims to be a RISC-chip...I'm looking for a doc to explain the instruction set. Then again, maybe you'll never have to deal with that directly. You might only have to use higher-level programming languages.

@Lwasserman They're going to teach us the basics of C programming and how to use it on embedded systems. So yeah, maybe we'll only use high level languages

@proto_azure Ah C, my old friend, my old nemesis....