@Kenny, I saw your reply as well, while I wrote, thanks.
I don't have any Atmel chips currently. And yes this is one reason why I am interested for them, because a large online community exists, and it is less likely you are ejected from the forum on behalf of some foreign car maker who becomes paranoid quickly his customer would disappear because your comments lack any professionalism. The Motorola/Freescale people are rather like they'd friendly point out what you are doing wrong, and they'd know how to tax their own mileage more instantly. I'd say so. The only thing is I think his car customers don't even know there are some small PICs inside them I just hope it was not Honda, they recently lost 2 billions worth of sheet metal shells due to floodings.
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Well...I noticed there are many support parts now available for Arduino, including some small TFT displays for good prices.
I'd rather take a MCU chip, and build a circuit, not so much depending on USB for fancy purposes, or linear regulators. So if I buy Arduino PCB I'd remove these regulators/capacitors.
But it's the Atmel chips platform that could be interesting for some tasks, and the codebase.
I am sometimes slow at getting together all the components, having wireless modem, I have to consider when to download a 2 or 3 Gbytes installer. Having some larger PICs around for 2 years or so, never built circuits, until recently. I am just starting trying to increase professionalism while using the midrange 16Fs.
So I really need some guidance for the Atmel stuff, true I do search the net, but for instance the above links have been helpful for me, this is the kind of information I am looking for.
There might be the case where really Atmel chip is better for some purpose, for instance the PIC C compiler is not really useful for the small baseline chips, maybe the Atmel IDE can produce better code.
Altogether I think maybe 20% of circuits I build eventually are interesting to consider Atmel.
I am not really looking to get wall adapters having these power jacks, I had repeated cases where they destroyed gadgets due to wrong voltage/wrong polarity. At best I'd replace the power jack with screw terminals. Most of the time I use batteries, and MC dc/dc converters. Or also electronic transformers giving off 5 volts directly.
The descision if to buy a ready-made Arduino, or getting some Atmel chips and try to start bulding circuits from scratch, has not yet been made, I am considering your opinion on this.
You see on the photos, I took off the GLCD from the carrier PCB, because the 18f24j10 is 3.3 volts technology, while the Arduino PCB is carrying 5v level shifter. Well...I ordered blank GLCD only the seller generously shipped the version having carrier PCB.
Another case is where I bought a radiation counter PCB (blank) designed for Arduino, and modding it to be used carrying a PIC microcontroller. I don't mind to use Arduino PCBs or hardware add on's, and to modify them for PIC. I think it makes sense to take advantage of the work that was already done, instead of completely designing it myself.
It is true older PICs are not so powerful, there are many hobby level circuits around for instance based on 16f84 but this is misleading, more modern PICs for instance enhanced midrange (16f1503,1824, etc.) have long surpassed the level of these 1K/few pheripherals/weird banking PICs.
I really wonder about people implementing a text message scroller on these older PICs, I found it still very difficult having two pointer registers+linear address space+larger RAM+4x the Flash memory space. Maybe to some degree, due to assembly language, which I prefered to use until recently.