PIC Programming (Recent)

2008 Meetings:

At the August meeting Alex demonstrated using HAPSIM, a software component simulator. HAPSIM simulates components such as buttons and leds in software, and can be used to test AVR microprocessor applications on a computer screen before committing to actual hardware. Stuart explained some details of his reduced instruction set language for PICs. Andrew discussed interfacing a PICAxe chip to the Xbee module for wireless remote control, as described in http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/docs/axe210.pdf.

At the July meeting Peter showed us some articles from Elektor, EPE, and Silicon Chip magazines. Bob Backstrom introduced us to Joomla, a webpage template that allows members to easily upload articles and comments. He proposed Joomla be used for the PIC Club website.

At the June meeting Stuart continued his description of his tiny programming language for the PICs, that he introduced at the March meeting, this time showing us the interpreter. Peter showed some articles from the March Elektor magazine.

"At the May meeting Martin showed the pressure/temperature monitor he built using an ATMEL HP03 sensor. He built it into a transparent floppy disk box, so all the components and the display could be seen from the outside without having to place components off the board and wire them up, and the flip lid gives easy access.

At the April meeting Martin showed the accelerometer he built, using the ATMEL LIS3LV02D6 chip. He donated a couple of PIC display and development boards, which were auctioned off at a bargain price. Steve showed us Ted Rossin's website where a Logic Analyser based on a PIC873 is described. Andrew introduced Microchip's PIC24FJ family, a new range of high pin count (64/80/100 pin) devices with 64-256KBytes of flash memory. Les discussed the merits of the serial data formats FM0, FM1 and Manchester.

At the March meeting Tony showed his stepper motor, operated by remote control. Stewart showed a tiny programming language he wrote for the PICs. He wrote an interpreter which is loaded into a PIC, enabling programs to be written in a few lines that would take several pages in Assembler.

At the February meeting Steve showed his depth sounder alarm for a yacht, David discussed using the PICkit2 as a debugger.

At the January meeting Tony showed the hardware he is developing for his solar tracker, Alex showed his Alpha system monitor that displays on a website environmental data of a remote site, and Neville suggested a User Language Program for the Eagle PCB Program.

2007 Meetings

At the November meeting Tony discussed using the PIC for remote control, and demonstrated some devices he built. Andrew discussed the PIC24 family. Tony showed us a PIC simulator and debugger.

At the October meeting David demonstrated the Eagle CAD program for designing circuit boards. Neville showed two of the four Instructables, Schematics and Layouts, for learning this program, and examined Eagle's User language Programs. Tony demonstrated two PIC devices he built. In the first a 3-colour LED was made to show many colours by its PIC driver. In the second a Passive Infrared Detector (PID) was set up to detect movement of an intruder and radio an alarm signal to a remote station. Geoff showed his PIC-controlled triac driver set and discussed some problems he was having with it.