In the last few decades, there has been a lot of controversies among the Atmel AVR and Microchip PIC users on WHICH IS BETTER, PIC or AVR?. According to Wikipedia, it refers the PIC as “Peripheral Interface Controller” and AVR as “Advanced Virtual RISC” but both uses RISC architecture.

I started programming using the PIC microcontroller with assembly language and I’ve programmed AVR too, so i decided to stick to the PIC. I think the Atmel AVR is winning not because of its price or availability but because of its large opensource community started by the Arduino.

According to Limor Fried(founder Adafruit) wrote about this competition in 2004, saying — The fight was initially between the Basic Stamp (PIC) and Arduino (AVR) Dev boards, in which arduino won the battle.

Though when Microchip acquired Atmel in 2016, hardware developers thought this would end the fight between the two microcontrollers as to which one is “best” but instead, the PIC is even dying faster in DIY projects.

Arduino AVR is winning due to its cheap board price and large opensource community support from dedicated users. My Pakistani friend Amer, a popular writer of PIC microcontroller books for MikroC and MikroBasic, wrote on his Facebook page (Breadboard Pakistan) that he has more PIC microcontrollers in his waste bin while he has more Arduino AVR boards in his shelf.

Microchip PIC Development Board

I opened a mobile phone power bank recently and discovered that it uses a PIC microcontroller, which shows that PIC is still widely used in electronic products which are not opensource. PIC hobbyists are getting discouraged and they are all moving to Arduino because of the availability of opensource and free libraries for their projects. Hence, Arduino is becoming more powerful with the support from platforms like Adafruit, SparkFun, Seeed Studio, Mysensors etc., Could this be the end of PIC for hobbyist projects?, Should Arduino AVR continue to dominate the opensource market?.

Due to this reasons, the PIC based microcontroller single board called CloudX was introduced as an opensource software and hardware platform where PIC users can collaborate, share and support each other, the platform converts PIC based codes into a library so that it can be reusable by newbies and hobbyist. This platform was started with the believe that there are still thousands of PIC users and hobbyists out there who are not familiar with the AVR and couldn’t find enough free and opensource codes or libraries to support their PIC-based projects. The CloudX IDE (programming software) is sitting on the MPLABX-C compiler to make programming easy and more flexible compared to the Arduino IDE

CloudX vs Arduino

I am beginning to enjoy this war between the opensource hardware single-board microcontroller manufacturers: CloudX vs Arduino, Raspberry Pi vs BeagleBone. The CloudX has over 700 opensource and free PIC function libraries that supports the popular PIC family like PIC16F628A, PIC16F877A, PIC18F2620 and PIC18F4620 etc. The libraries can also be easily ported into any other PIC microcontroller with few changes.

Raspberry Pi vs BeagleBone

In conclusion, The CloudX community depend on PIC users to join and support with tested codes and libraries that can be added to other upcoming CloudX versions.