PIC or AVR? Need advice for a project

Post Reply New Topic

I'm going to resurrect a project if I could. I wanted to design and build a high performance AM/FM/SW/WX radio based on NXP's NICE CRISP tuner and audio processor ICs. Now, these ICs are controlled via I2C bus. I have an evaluation board with the tuner module from Microtune and the audio processor IC, with PC software to control it. But I need to replace the PC software with firmware on a microcontroller, with buttons and an graphical blue OLED display. Would you guys recommend Microchip's PIC or Atmel's AVR for the microcontroller? And what is the reason for recommending?

Both have similar features. If one would work for your purposes, then the other probably would too.

When I went with the AVR years ago it was because of the availability of cheap dev tools and the free c compiler (avr-gcc and avr-libc). Since then Atmel has realesed the AVR Dragon, witch is a JTAG debugger and ISP programmer for $60 (an amazing deal for this sort of thing).

I'm not sure if there is anything similar for the PIC (there wasn't when I researched this all years ago, but I haven't looked into it since (there's not really a good reason to learn another 8-bit controller platform once you've already learned one)).