Hello, I have just 'discovered' this site and chip. I don't know why I've not
come across it before as ive done a fair few searches for an easily programmable
microcontroller.
I'd like to give some background on myself. I started to muck about with
electronics and picaxe a few months ago, pretty much stuck to the most basic
chips being the 08M and 14M as I could easily plug them straight onto a
breadboard along with the stero connector to program them.
I wrote an app in VB.NET to send and recieve data using the SerialPort control
which you just drag and drop onto a form.
When I wanted to go for a chip with a lot more power I ended up getting a
basic stamp and BOE and parts kit from Parallax. The Basic Stamp was pretty
expensive. Im not sure of the comparison with this chip here but I know the
Basic Stamp I purchased was a lot more expensive. And all Ive done so far is get
the Stamp to send a "Hello World" to my PC screen so I havent done anything yet.

I have two questions on my mind.

1. Once you have programmed the chip can you fairly easily pull it off the
development board and plug it onto a breadboard for its final application ?

2. Can you use this chip to accept data from a standard 4*4 keypad and is there
any tutorial out there on how to acclomplish this as I am rather clueless, well
to be honest I think I saw some keypad example code in a zip file so I know from
that that it CAN be done ?

Thanks for reading,

Mike.