PICBASIC PRO COMPILER INSTRUCTION SET
As you can see from the preceding comparison, the PICBASIC PRO compiler pro- vides a much more comprehensive instruction set and is the compiler of choice for serious development work. The mathematical functions are substantially more powerful.
It is, of course, also possible to program microcontrollers in assembly language and “C” (and other languages), but this book does not cover this programming. There are a number of good books on the subject and some that I looked over are listed in a file on the support web site for this book (www.encodergeek.com) with my comments.
Some educators feel that a junior college-level class on the subject is the best way to learn how to do this and there is some merit to this but for our purposes the PICBASIC PRO compiler will do everything we need.
In addition to the compiler, you need an editor to allow you to write and edit pro- grams with ease. A very adequate editor, the MicroCode Studio editor, is provided as a part of the compiler package. This comprehensive and powerful editor is available on the Internet at no charge from MicroCode Studios. This is a complete editor with no limit on the number of lines of code that you can write. It is fully integrated with the software and hardware provided by microEngineering Labs and is the editor of choice for most users. The free version is limited to compiling programs for just a few microcontrollers, but these include both the 16F877A, 18F4331, and the 16F84A.
The editors available are as follows:
N MicroCode Studio Mecanique’s MicroCode Studio is a powerful, visual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with In-Circuit Debugging (ICD) capa- bility designed specifically for microEngineering Labs PICBASIC PRO compiler. This software can be downloaded from the Internet at no charge. The only limitation on it is that it allows you to run only one IDE at one time, but that’s not a real handicap at our level of interest. This is the editor that best suits our needs and all programs in this book were written with this editor.
N Proton+ This is a lite basic editor provided by CrownHill. This is a test version of their editor and is limited to 50 lines of code and three processors including the PIC 16F877A. It’s a nice editor but limited in the free version to the 50 lines of code. If you like this editor, you can use this as your main editor and then cut and paste to the MicroCode Studio to compile and run your programs and thus go around the 50-line limit. The native language of this editor is not the same as PicBasic so there are other handicaps to contend with, which are best avoided.
N MicroChip MPLAB This is the software that the maker of the microcontrollers, Microchip Technologies, provided for editing programs written for their PIC series of microcontrollers. It is an assembly level programmer. We are not going to be doing any assembly language programming, but the editor can be useful and you should be aware of its existence.