PICAXE is still going. Has all the virtues and vices of an educational system:
- for simple applications rather than complex
- limited number of boards and add-on modules
- quite expensive – the starter kit is about £50. Might be just what’s needed, or not. Decide yourself!
- interpreted, not compiled, so will on the slow side
- only works with pic chips pre-loaded with the PICAXE interpreter
- requires a special cable
- programmed in a language that’s vaguely like BASIC.
Example:
for b1 = 0 to 63 ; start a loop
sertxd(“The value of b1 is ”,#b1,13,10)
pause 1000
next b1 ; next loop
Though the PIC chips and language are potent PICAXE is closed source. That severely limits community support, so the number of add-ons is pitiful compared with Arduino and others. The number of microcontrollers supported is small too – a subset of the PIC family, whereas the Arduino-IDE supports many different hobby and professional development microcontrollers – not just Arduino. Here’s what the PICaxe forum says about Arduino vs PICAXE support .
Chief selling point is the claim that PICAXE is simple: certainly true in a classroom, but after that, I doubt it. I suspect Bazyle is right about BBCMicroBit – it too is aimed at education, with an even simpler drag and drop load mechanism. The raspberry Pico with Python is also drag and drop, well worth considering if you want a cheap powerful board and a modern language. If Python performance isn’t good enough, or doesn’t support a module, Picos can be programmed in C/C++. It’s not boxed in like PICAXE.
Dave