PIC Programmers
I'm starting to feel the inclination to get back into electronics hobbyism these days - and on the photography side that means closeup / macro shots will be coming along soon.
The fever hits me now and then to make some LEDs blink, and the way I generally do that is to write software for a microcontroller (MCU) - a tiny, cheap, single-chip computer - to do it.
Why bother? You might well ask. Well! MCUs form the heart of all sorts of nifty circuitry - anything that isn't actually a computer and yet is "computerized", which is pretty much everything, anymore. I plan to make fun simple things like clocks and little games and decorative blinky lights, but stuff like homemade MP3 players, GPS units, simple autonomous robots, and Web-based remote control devices are now well within the reach of hobbyist designers. All you have to do is get specialized circuitry to handle the GPS reception or MP3 decoding or time displaying, then plunk a MCU down to order it around according to directions specified by software you write.
These three circuits pictured are all "programmers", or interface devices that let you send MCU software from the PC where you wrote it to the actual MCU chip. These are all for the PIC family of chips manufactured by Microchip, Inc.
In the upper left, the venerable PIC-1a from 1996, a small-scale-commercial variant of a famous programmer invented in April 1994 by a hobbyist named David Tait. The "Tait Classic" circuit, as it came to be known, was intended only for one kind of PIC MCU, the surprisingly useful 16C84. It had space for a 1024-instruction program and 36 bytes of data RAM. Much, much more powerful MCUs are available these days for less than the old C84 cost, but it was a great little chip. The Tait programmer made hobbyist MCU programming affordable, I believe; until recently the professional-grade tools for it were very pricey by hobbyist terms. The Tait Classic could be built for a few dollars or ordered pre-assembled from a cottage industry sort of shop like I did for, IIRC, about $50.
In the upper right, a cottage-commercial version of the P16Pro40, which is basically a newer and more flexible version of the Tait Classic, able to handle several different chips. I think I got this one in about 2004.
These two both still work, as far as I know, but they connect to the PC through the parallel port - and modern PCs don't often have parallel ports! Certainly the little netbook I use now doesn't. Hence, my decision to buy the programmer in the bottom of the shot, the Pickit 3. It's a USB-based programmer made by Microchip itself, and it has several features the Tait-types don't - plus it's fairly cheap, as things like this now are (about $70 for the "deluxe" version of the Pickit 3).
Nifty, eh?
PIC Programmers
I'm starting to feel the inclination to get back into electronics hobbyism these days - and on the photography side that means closeup / macro shots will be coming along soon.
The fever hits me now and then to make some LEDs blink, and the way I generally do that is to write software for a microcontroller (MCU) - a tiny, cheap, single-chip computer - to do it.
Why bother? You might well ask. Well! MCUs form the heart of all sorts of nifty circuitry - anything that isn't actually a computer and yet is "computerized", which is pretty much everything, anymore. I plan to make fun simple things like clocks and little games and decorative blinky lights, but stuff like homemade MP3 players, GPS units, simple autonomous robots, and Web-based remote control devices are now well within the reach of hobbyist designers. All you have to do is get specialized circuitry to handle the GPS reception or MP3 decoding or time displaying, then plunk a MCU down to order it around according to directions specified by software you write.
These three circuits pictured are all "programmers", or interface devices that let you send MCU software from the PC where you wrote it to the actual MCU chip. These are all for the PIC family of chips manufactured by Microchip, Inc.
In the upper left, the venerable PIC-1a from 1996, a small-scale-commercial variant of a famous programmer invented in April 1994 by a hobbyist named David Tait. The "Tait Classic" circuit, as it came to be known, was intended only for one kind of PIC MCU, the surprisingly useful 16C84. It had space for a 1024-instruction program and 36 bytes of data RAM. Much, much more powerful MCUs are available these days for less than the old C84 cost, but it was a great little chip. The Tait programmer made hobbyist MCU programming affordable, I believe; until recently the professional-grade tools for it were very pricey by hobbyist terms. The Tait Classic could be built for a few dollars or ordered pre-assembled from a cottage industry sort of shop like I did for, IIRC, about $50.
In the upper right, a cottage-commercial version of the P16Pro40, which is basically a newer and more flexible version of the Tait Classic, able to handle several different chips. I think I got this one in about 2004.
These two both still work, as far as I know, but they connect to the PC through the parallel port - and modern PCs don't often have parallel ports! Certainly the little netbook I use now doesn't. Hence, my decision to buy the programmer in the bottom of the shot, the Pickit 3. It's a USB-based programmer made by Microchip itself, and it has several features the Tait-types don't - plus it's fairly cheap, as things like this now are (about $70 for the "deluxe" version of the Pickit 3).
Nifty, eh?