Kudos Microchip

I wanted to make this brief/informal post to give kudos to one of those companies that make it easy to prototype using their parts, Microchip.  


In addition to my work doing RF and microwave design, I occasionally write a little bit of firmware targeted to small micro-controllers that do the housekeeping and control for the hardware I design.   Whether just for a test/mock-up or for testing code for a real project, I think it is pretty awesome to have code written and tested (perhaps with eval boards and breadboards strung together) before "real" hardware arrives so that there's a good chance it'll work first thing.   Over my career I've become really intolerant of hardware being available before there is firmware to at least minimally exercise it for testing.   So when I can, I make sure I'm not the one holding things up.

Microchip has a really wide spread of parts that are offered in both tiny surface mount packages as well as easy-to-build-by-hand DIP ones (same code runs on both).     I've built some breadboards that I've reused (just like the core designs) several times.   Some like to shy away from hand-built stuff, but if it saves somebody else hours of scratching their head because my code doesn't work, the couple hours invested to build it is well worth it.

In any case -- thanks Microchip -- for keeping things really within reach of all of us and providing us this sort of agility.