Although Microchip maintains an extensive list of approved sales offices (some have their own WWW sites), nowadays you can buy PICs from almost any distributor. In the UK the two best known are Farnell and RS Components. Possibly hobbyists are more familiar with Maplin and their high-street outlets. Although PICs are relatively cheap the prices in the Farnell, RS and Maplin catalogues don't compare favourably with US distributors like Digikey. The PIC16x84 is available cheaply in the UK thanks to the much maligned pay-TV hackers. Several companies specialise in supplying PIC-based smartcard replacements and often have 16C84s for sale at attractive prices; for example see Techtronics price list. Some time ago I found Crownhill Associates Ltd's pre-tax price of £2.20 for PIC16C84-04/Ps too good to miss and was pleasantly surprised by the speedy service. More recently I bought ten PIC16F84-04/P chips from Keymaster Software Ltd for £1.89 each plus tax. Going by their price list another good source is Kestrel Electronics. Crownhill, Keymaster and several others advertise cheap PICs and EEPROMs on Usenet in the alt.satellite.tv forsale and crypt newsgroups.
An interesting site that describes a variety of pretty inventive things to do with PICs. Eric is now developing things using the ultrafast Scenix chip.
Kalle Pihlajasaari has put together a collection of links and describes his own favourite PIC projects.
GNUPIC [Updated 5/Jun/98]
Started by Rick Miller but now maintained by James Bowman, the GNUPIC project is an effort to produce free PIC development tools for multiple platforms. When I last looked Paul Vollebregt's European GNUPIC mirror was still going.
Fast Forward let you ask PIC related questions via their embedded systems programming answer line. The answers are provided by PIC guru Andrew Warren.
