Lucio Di Jasio manages an international team responsible for business development and strategic marketing at Microchip, for the entire portfolio of 8-bit microcontrollers (PIC + AVR). Right before the weekend begins, we have prepared an interview with him.
He talks about when he first used click boards™, why they sparked his attention, and Microchip’s 50 in 50 campaign with our clicks.
1.Lucio, what is your role at Microchip?
“Business Development Manager Europe.”
2.When have you used a click board for the first time?
“Honestly, I forgot! Probably two or three years ago … there were already a hundred or so… I needed to try a BLE module, quickly!”
3.Why click boards™ sparked your attention?
Form factor, function, simplicity! There are so many flavors to choose from and they come complete with code examples, schematics, user guides, not to mention beautiful boxes!
4.“It Just Clicks”, what convinced Microchip to adopt the mikroBUS™ standard and endorse it with the “50 in 50” campaign?
“It was just a "perfect fit”. We had been trying many times before to create small daughter boards for modular evaluation kits for our 8-bit microcontrollers, but we were always running out of time and quickly out of steam… For our apps and FAE teams, it was love at first sight!”
- More than 50 click boards are powered up with a Microchip component or module, and more are coming. What impact do all these add-on boards have in your design phase?
“The "50 in 50" campaign has been important for us from multiple points of view. First of all, we wanted to give a strong signal to our community of 8-bit microcontroller users. MPLAB Code Configurator (MCC) is primarily a Rapid Development tool, if you are serious about rapid software development, the Clicks are the perfect complement to enable Rapid Hardware Development too.
Secondly, this is a strategy that goes beyond PIC16 and PIC18. It extends to other product lines from Microchip, including PIC24, dsPIC, and PIC32, but (spoiler alert) will soon cover ALL microcontroller architectures!
Lastly, the “50 in 50” campaign has become a test bed for the development of the MCC tool itself. With the new Click boards addition, we have demonstrated that MCC can now configure multiple peripherals at once with a single “click” (pun intended). This opens the door to future possibilities and extensions of this concept of rapid prototyping and development to simplify ever more complex classes of projects.”
- Which one is your favorite click?
Ah, easy! It’s the PIR (remote temperature sensor) click. This past Halloween I had a lot of fun assembling a "Vampire Detector”… Well, you must know that my son was wearing a Vampire costume and we were playing hide and seek in the backyard … you are going to guess the rest, right?
- What click do you wish to see in our portfolio that is not currently available?
“Well, I am Italian you know. A Coffee Click would be really the perfect match for our XPRESS boards! “
Thank you for your time, Lucio.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika