The Engineer Tutor
Learn from our Experience
Here are a few notes I would like to share with you about some things that I have discovered about the Microchip PIC processors.
I have been very interested in the PIC24F parts particularly the 28 pin DIP parts. These parts give me the opportunity to use a bread board and experiment with the chips. I have also designed a board that takes care of some of the more difficult things about the part that free you up to experiment. This board has an interface for the PICkit 2. It also has a crystal and reset circuits built on. On one side of the board it has single in line pins that can be pushed into a bread board giving you access to most of the pins of the part. I have used this very board to implement interfaces to RS232 level shifters, SD Cards, a USB host chip, and other interesting parts. See the order page if you want to purchase one of these boards. They are very inexpensive.
I/O pins of the PIC24F parts
The pins of the PIC24F parts have the ability to change their function. You can assign or set a pin to be the receive pin of UART 1 or the SDI. This makes the limited number of pins of the PIC24F parts very flexible. I have created a program that allows you to configure these pins using a graphical interface. This program generates some source code that you can put right in your PIC C program and it will setup your pins for you. It is a slick program and I’m letting you have it for free. Just let me know if there are any problems with it.
UARTs of the PIC24F parts
This program automagically generates code to drive the UARTs of PIC24F parts. It can generate code for polled I/O or interrupts. There are several options that you can set that influences the generated code. Enjoy.