I can see all the parts that come in the Vex kit and I am VERY interested in buying one, especially to evaluate it for use in the robotics club I run at school, however, I am wondering what type of development environment comes in the kit. From my research I see that the Vex controller is a PIC based controller and I am very familiar with PIC microcontrollers. However, does the kit include a C development environment or any other dev tools?
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The Vex Starter Kit does not come with any C development environment. There is an EasyC Programming Kit that is a software development tool available for purchase online. We also have a Prototype Programming Kit that is available over the phone only. The Prototype Kit comes with MPLAB and a C18 compiler from Microchip. For more info, see our Downloads page http://www.vexlabs.com/vex-robotics-downloads.shtml**