I'm usually pretty harsh on PIC microcontrollers. But the other week I actually found myself choosing a PIC for a project, I couldn't believe what I was doing.

Thing is, Microchip have got the number of available USB endpoints correct in their "18F" family. We almost exclusively use ARM based processors, but my favoured ARM flavoured chip only has 4 fricking endpoints, which basically means that it can't be used as a composite device. On the other hand, the PIC has 32 endpoints, which is more than enough for the application which we require it for. Fortunately this application requires no processing, just shifting of data in and out - so the PIC will do fine for this.

And as a side rant, why exactly does a CDC serial port under windows require a inf file to install? Is this just to extort money from hardware vendors if they don't want security warnings popping up? OS X and Linux handle them quite happily.