I would love to see a breakout board or module based on this PIC. I found this [ET-PIC Stamp module, but have never dealt with [Futurlec before. They also have the [ET-AVR Stamp and [ET_ARM Stamp (but I wish it had an LPC2138 or LPC2148 on it).
A board using the [ET-PIC Stamp module or just the 18F8722 with Ethernet would be a very good product. The real nice thing about the 18F8722 is that is has TWO MSSPs which can each be used for I2C or SPI. Of course, the 8722 also has LOTS if I/O pins available, since it comes in an 80 pin TQFP. This PIC also has an external memory bus for up to 2 MB of additional memory. I don’t know what restrictrions are on the use of external memory are yet, but this should be a very nice feature to have. I would love to see a DIL type breakout board for the 8722 that would make it usable on breadboards.
For instance, I want to create a module that can talk to a master processor using one of USB, I2C, SPI, or standard serial and still be able to use I2C and SPI to talk to peripherals such as sensors and interfaces such as ADC’s and DAC’s. I can’t do that easily with other PICs, and the 8722 would be perfect for this sort of thing with its two MSSP’s. I just can’t solder such things with so many pins, and I bet I am not the only one. I could add an 18F2550 to get USB and a 30F4011 or 30F4013 to have added compute power for things like inverse kinematics and/or quadrature encoder handling and still be able to use I2C and SPI for other things with the second MSSP.
8-Dale](ET-PIC Stamp Microcontroller Module)](ET-ARM Stamp Microcontroller Module)](ET-AVR Stamp Microcontroller Module)](http://www.futurlec.com)](ET-PIC Stamp Microcontroller Module)
