gnupic: Thread: PIC's; Been Away for a While.

	I have been on this list since at least 2005 and got a
PicStart+ in December of 2005 which worked perfectly the last
time I used it on a 16F84.

	I got involved with other projects at work and at
home and simply stopped using it so I have a good assortment of
older PIC's and the Picstartplus which has been sitting
patiently, so to speak, on a shelf awaiting the next project.

	One of the reasons why I drifted away was that I
realized that several PIC projects I wanted to build would go
more easily in C when involving arithmetic calculations such as
temperature sensors that work in Celsius when one might just
want Fahrenheit or visa versa. So, I began to scan the roughly
1,500 messages that back logged on this list and it looks like
there is a C compiler or two our there.

	Basically, what I am hoping for is that my Picstartplus
is not land fill material yet and that I can get a modern
development setup that works under Debian Lenny.

	Now, here is a bit of a issue.  As a computer user who
happens to be blind, I work best in Linux in the command-line mode.

	When last I programmed a PIC which was in 2006 or 2007,
I had good luck with gpasm and gpsym although getting the right
libraries in the Debian distribution I was using at the time for
gpsym to build was tons of fun. It did eventually work with help
from Scott Dattalo so I am basically trying to get a development
system restarted again and hoping my older programmers such as the
Picstartplus will at least let me use what I already have.

	I am used to gcc and using gdb to trace/debug programs I
have written so anything that is similar in look and feel will
be fine.

	I am guessing any C compiler uses a library of various
PIC specs so that it knows how much code space and what
registers are available for each PIC much the way that mpasm
looks at the device designation in one's source code and goes
from there.

Thanks for any advice. I am using Debian Lenny and keep it
updated.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group