Want to learn PIC Programming? Good deal here!

[Rombus]

For those that don't know, the PICmicro is a programmable microcontroller. A very powerful PIC is what drives the FRC Robot Controller and OI. There also very cheap, even the most powerful and expensive ones cost under $10 and most of the common ones cost a buck or so. You can Google PIC and find a huge amount of projects and information for PICs. Interested? well, there is a good cheep way to learn pics i just found.

Microchip has a nice starter kit called PICKit 2 Starter Kit. It includes a USB Programmer, the MPLAB IDE, and a bunch of lessons to learn the basics of ASM for the PIC.

So whats the good deal? Well most online retailers sell the kit for 49.99. But Newark electronics sells it for 39.99 (Link Here ) But to make this even a better deal, Newark included 9 samples of other PICmicros. Even a 40 pin, and 2 SMT PICs. I picked up this kit a few days ago and im already very happy with it! its a great learning tool!

(sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch, just trying to pass on a good deal to anyone who wants to learn pics!)

[Mike Bortfeldt]

Rick,

Thanks for the link. I bought one and it's been kind of fun playing around with it. I got to thinking that one of the small PICs would probably be great at identifying direction on a Gear Tooth Sensor (GTS) and after a little trial and error, had one of the 12F series easily detecting the difference between a 39 microsecond pulse and an 83 microsecond pulse (as generated by a timer on another pin). Since we don't use a GTS on our robot, I'll have to dig one up from storage and try this out on the real thing. I was thinking that if you just change state on two other output pins (one for forward, one for reverse), you could wire these to DIO 3-6 on the RC and interrupt on change (or you could make your own quadrature output for that matter). Easy forward/reverse counting for a couple of bucks.

Thanks again.

Mike

[KenWittlief]

Ive been using PIC processors for years. They are great for small projects

and I really like the small ones, like the 6 pin PIC10F200 that comes in a SOT-6 package (3 x 4mm)!

Its amazing how many things you can do with a tiny micro that runs on 2V.