Few months ago, I decided to give a chance to the mikroElektronika compilers (I chose the mikroBasic PRO for PIC).
So, I installed the complier and I wrote a program to blink a LED. Wow, it took me far shorter than my fist MPLAB attempt to blink a LED. Then I made a traffic light for my daughter's Thomas tracks. Piece of cake!
I decided to try to drive some servo out of a PIC. It was a software improvment of a testing bench I did some time ago (giving pulses, servo signals, PWM, one-shots, etc.). It worked as a charm!
Later I moved into PWM driving of a Mosfet (I used their integrated library for PWM). Again, shorter than expected.
The latest projects (maybe I put some online) involve current and voltage measurements and displaying them on a LCD (serial connection, 4 bit).
Here you can see all these guys can offer as compilers (C, basic, pascal) for all PIC (8 to 32 bit, dsPIC), AVR, ARM and 8051. Pay them a visit! mikroElektronika
PS: the free version (full fucntionnal, limited to 2k of program) is good enough for a lot of amateur projects like mine.
