The Pic line of microcontrollers from Microchip has been very popular for many years, but they quite daunting to use for the beginner. Revolution Education in the UK have modified a range of Pic devices with their own custom boot loader and Basic language so that they are truly easy to use and program for anyone interested in this field. They are being used in High Schools and Colleges around the world to provide students with a quick, painless way to experiment with these devices.

The Picaxe development environment is provided free of charge and Revolution Education offer a range of development boards and projects at quite low cost to get people started. My own students use them as a tool to understand basic programming concepts and to gain an understanding of simple circuit applications.

 Some of the features of the Picaxe development system are:

Picaxe features:

• Easy to follow Basic laguage
• Program creation via flow charts
• Excellent documentation availble right inside the development environment
• Freely downloadable (Free registration required)
• Very low cost
• A range of device ranging from 8 to 40 pins for every application