DerBlinkenLightzen!
8-pin microcontrollers are pretty neat things. I’d only used the larger PICs before, I didn’t see how these could be all that useful. And the 16C74s could do more… twenty years ago. These days, the 8-pin PICs have caught up with the older models in internal features, if not pincount. It’s really quite remarkable:
Same amount of program memory as the one from PICrat (actually, the modern version of the chip from PICrat, with the fancy flash memory), the CPU’s faster, it has more RAM, it has an internal EEPROM for persistent storage, same number of digital comms, one less CCP (but 32 fewer pins, so okay), half as many ADC channels (again, 32 fewer pins) but higher precision on those channels, same number of timers, a new comparator, a wider range of operating voltages and it takes less power (much less, it turns out).… Read the rest
