PICAXE, Arduino
May 07, 08 by M. HolgerSo, I ordered a PICAXE 28X1 board from Advanced Micro Circuits (aka World Educational Services), and it arrived yesterday. It’s a bit smaller than I expected (which isn’t a bad thing at all!), but it was also sans-interface cable, which was a bit of a let down (the cable is, however, en route!). Either way, it’s a compact microcontroller package with a decent feature set, so I’m looking forward to playing with it. Fits inside an altoids tin, sans-batteries, and I suspect with a proper LiIon pack, it’d probably fit in the tin with batteries. We’ll see… 
It was up against the Freeduino SB (produced by Solarbotics / HVWTech, a derivative of the Arduino Deicimila board), which probably would have been my choice had I done some more research up front. The Freeduino SB is a bit cheaper, mostly due to the fact that it ships as a semi-kit where only the SMT components are pre-soldered, and the rest of the assembly is up to the purchaser, but the trade-off was that the PICAXE was built with the capability to add a motor driver by simply socketing an L293 into a slot on the PICAXE board — the Arduino would require an external circuit. What I didn’t know, was that Adafruit sells a motor driver “shield” for the Arduino for just under $20.
But wait! There’s more! This is where I would normally run down a list of pros/cons for the different hardware, but here’s what it amounts to:
- Arduino development software available for Win, Linux, Mac
- Arduino interface is standard USB - no special cables needed
- Arduino is an Atmel ATmega-based proc, with tons of community support — including a GCC tool chain
- Arduino has multiple add-on “shields” available to extend capabilities, including a motor driver and a prototyping shield
- PICAXE compiler uses BASIC - more simplistic to learn/use than C as the Arduinos use
- PICAXE board has integrated support for L293 motor driver
- PICAXE setup and development time is much shorter, just write code and go, no assembly required!
See? PICAXE gets a few points for “ease of use” — Arduino picks up pretty much every other category though.
