Flowcode Support Board

Hi,
I understand the PIC18F based ECIO28 and ECIO40 have been dicontinued.
With a global chip shortage, the dsPIC is also unavailable at this time.

I really liked these modules as they were a robust drop in controllers.
With this in mind, what are peoples thoughts on alternatives?

For most of our projects the current obsession with putting ESPs's and PiZero's in everything is just over kill. Do I really need high mHz processors just to do a bit of CAN and run some logic?

I've very much got used the Microchip PIC way of things so AVR, whilst there are many options, just does not excite me. I know others who learnt on AVR would always try to win me around.

The dsPic24 (ECIO40P) actually was a a very good package for most projects I work on.
Bootloader and good compatability with FC.
Great documentation on every detail from Microchip.
USB port for PC comms and programming.
integrated ECAN
PPS (periferal pin select) really made it easier to share the featrues of a PIC around the chips pins.
16bit with a good clock speed for most embedded projects.

I guess something with an integrated Ethernet stack or WiFi would be handy but honestly, I think I would mostly use an external module for the few times I needed to go this route.

Other option is to source a few PIC24 chips and run my own PCB but time on assembly for 64pin+ QTFP streches my hand solder skills!

Hello,

The chip we use on the 16-bit PIC version of the ECIO is indeed a great option and is certainly my goto chip for most projects. It is a shame that they are currently very hard to get hold of, a situation made much worse by those that saw the shortages coming and then stockpiled.

As it's on of our goto chips on many products we are currently having to buy from the scalpers and prices have hit an all time high of nearly £100 per chip which is incredible. Thankfully we have also got back orders with other vendors at reasonable prices so the end is hopefully in sight. However this greatly ties our hands for other projects going forwards.

AVR's are very good but are very different to PICs. I do prefer the PIC to AVR and it's nice to know that Arduino initially plumped for a PIC too. They only ended up with AVR due to the free toolchain available thanks to its more standardised architecture.

STM32 are another great option but these seemed to dry up well before the MIcrochip devices did so again a bit of a cause for concern.

The ESP32 devices are very good and certainly are a good bang for the price having dual core 200MHz operation and in built WIFI/Bluetooth in such a small package. However as you're running a lot of things via the ESP32 library I do wonder about how much power this strips away from the user. When making Flowcode CAL code I have often had to start peeling back the layers of the ESP32 library to make the performance acceptable and the documentation is very lacking when compared to a standard PIC device. There is also the risk of China's philosiphy of tear up and start again kicking in, who's to say if these will be available to buy in 5 or 10 years time. Saying this the ESP8266 has done very well and is still very much available so hopefully Espressif are here for the forseeable and will continue churning them out.

There's also the Pico but I'm still strugglng to find a reason to actually put one of these into service. If they had included Wifi/Bluetooth then I would totally get it but at the moment I'm not sold.

Hopefully things start to calm down again soon and ideally Microchip stop creating tens or even hundreds of new almost identical devices each year and instead focus on making a few really good devices that they can easily mass produce to meet demands. I would like to see the ECIO range return, they were one of my projects many moons ago but we would need to find a better route to market as our previous model just didn't really make them viable. Annoyingly they were available to buy well before Arduino ever came onto the scene, they just didn't quite have the same appeal with not having the same open and free development environment. Speaking with the guys from Arduino they have commented on how they would like something like Flowcode but they can't justify the development with their open source (free for users) business model.