Yes, bloatware seems all the rage. Atmel have gone the same way with Atmel Studio 6 except I think it is about 750MB! AVRStudio 4 will still work nicely and it is what I use all the time. This has WinAVR C compiler built-in but you want to use AVRStudio 4.18 and Service pack 3 not last version, 4.19, as this has a bug where it looses the C tool chain. Here is a link to one of our blog posts on AVRStudio that tells you where the software is.:

AVRStudio Explorered

AVRStudio will run an Atmel programmer and debugger called AVRDragon that can single step or act as a programmer from the AVRStudio environment. It is much more reliable than PICKit3.

A last option is IAR Workbench. This is an excellent C compiler and development environment. It is very expensive but there is a free version called Kick Start that is limited to 4KB output code on C compiler but unlimited on assembler. It is a much better compiler than WinAVR and you can run AVRDragon emulator from this environment. but they call it DragonAVR for some reason. Here is link to IAR download page:

IAR AVR C compiler

Finally, have a look at our STK200 Dragon kit, which has all the above plus books on CD, hardware board and lots of sample code

I\’ve given up with PICs. I\’m wasting hearbeats on it. Its just to much hassle. For an amateur, all of the MicroChip software is abysmally documented. The MicroChip website a a maze of confusion. All of the manuals describe the features, but not why you need them, nor how to use them. I cant comprehend how a C compiler needs 875Mb of space. In my professional capacity as an IBM mainframe applications programmer I have loaded Ansi cobol compilers off a single 1.44 floppy in the past, and a comprehensive development environment (ISPF/PC) from another.With regard to PicKit3, just do a google search for \”PicKit3 not found message\” and it will take you to Microchips own user forum, or checkout forum.allaboutcircuits.com and another dozen blogs and sites all saying the same thing.Anyway I\’m going to give ATMega328 chips a try, but NOT going the Arduino route. Do you have any recommendations for a simple to use programming (software) environment (other than notepad) , C compiler, chip loader and most importantly single step debugger (similar toIBM mainframe Xpediter).Thanks for your help.

Hi
It is all opinion but you are correct that you need a pretty fast PC. It was mostly the problems with MPLAB 8.7 CD supplied by Microchip that made us change our kits to use MPLAB X as we were getting endless tech support problems with this. MPLAB X and Atmel Studio 6 will both slow down an old XP machine even when not being used as you say but it was a case of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea with a bad Microchip CD that comes with PICKit3 or a piece of bloatware.

That being said, we haven’t seen the problems you report with PIKit3 or PICKit2 for that matter, on MPLAB X. Maybe this is related to the speed of the PC or USB driver problems on XP as support for XP USB drivers is getting a bit flaky since 8.1 was released as it is hard to design a driver that effectively supports both properly.

We tend to use the separate programming utility, MPLAB IPE v2.15, for programming with PICKit3 rather than run from MPLAB X itself. Have you tried this instead?

All the semiconductor companies seem to have this attitude – if we ignore the complaints, they will go away. They do tend to do something about it in their own sweet time if it isn’t too much trouble but you would have thought that having someone give an answer would be good customer relations. The problem, I believe, is down to Marketing and Communications departments who want absolute control over all messages from the company so an engineer who could give an answer isn’t allowed to.

I believe that Microchip have now ported USB libraries but they haven’t moved all older libraries and examples to XC compiler. But they are certainly only supporting MPLAB X and XC compiler with current libraries although legacy projects are available. For more information, see Microchip Library for Applications (MLA)