The PICAXE range of microcontrollers are PIC microcontrollers from Microchip that have been programmed with a BASIC interpreter and a bootloader, allowing BASIC programmes written on an ordinary PC to be downloaded via a serial cable.
Picaxes are designed for school classrooms and are easy to use and virtually bullet-proof. You don’t need any special programming boards, and the programming software is free. So with nothing more than a PC and a picaxe, you can get up and running in minutes. Check out their creators, Revolution Education in the UK, or MicroZed in Australia for supplies.
The picaxe is ideally suited to many projects around the home brewery. Gone are the days of needing to calibrate analog temperatures or 'hard-wiring' a logic sequence in a circuit. The picaxe can do many things in a very simple way which makes it an ideal experimenter chip. If you want greater capacity and have the time to learn how to code it, then the pic range of chips may be more your thing - but as a mix of capability and ease of use, the picaxe has found a home in this brewery.
