PIC programmer

Introduction

Welcome to MICRO’s. I know you are itching to get started with your new

software and begin programming PICs as soon as possible, so this introduction

will get you familiar with the MICRO’s suite of software and during the process

you will also start writing some small programs and hopefully get them working in

the real world.

If you have the MICRO’s Experimenters Kit, then going through the projects will

be quite easy. If you do not have the Experimenters Kit, then you may like to get

a PIC programmer so that you can program the software into a 16F84 chip to

complete the projects.

Before we get going, you have to understand that a PIC, or any other

microcontroller chip for that matter, is just a piece of silicon wrapped in plastic

with pins sticking out to connect it to the outside world. It does not have any

brains, nor can it think for itself, so anything the chip does is the direct result of

our intelligence and imagination. Sometimes you may get the feeling that these

things are alive and are put here to torment your every waking minute, but this is

usually due to bugs in your software, not a personality inside the chip. So please

remember:

The PIC will always do what you tell it to, not necessarily what you want it to.

One other thing that can cause problems is in the way you handle the chip itself.

Your body is more than likely charged with Static Electricity and is usually the

zap you feel when you touch a metal object after walking on nylon carpet or

similar. The PIC’s most definitely do not like this high voltage discharging into

them. It can destroy the functionality of the chip either totally or partially, so

always try to avoid touching the pins with your fingers.

The PIC 16F84 data sheet is available in PDF format on the CD ROM in the

Acrobat directory.

My First PIC Projects - Page 3

Flash That LED

This would have to be the universal number one project for new PIC

programmers. If you have had anything to do with writing software for PC’s, then

it would be the equivalent of writing “hello world” on the monitor for the first time.

You might be thinking at this stage...“What a boring project. I want to create a

robot that does amazing things, not mess around with silly ‘hello world’ or LED

flash programs.”

Patience my friend. Things like that will come in due course, and as the old

saying goes, “You have to crawl before you can walk”.

OK then, so how do we get started?

You might be tempted to jump straight in and write volumes of code right from

the start, but I can only say, that in all probability, your software will not work.

Now this might sound a bit tedious, but “planning” is the best way to begin any

piece of new software. Believe me, in the long run, your code will stand a much

better chance of working and it will save you valuable time. Other benefits are

that your code will be structured and documented much better, which means you

can read through and understand it more easily in the future if the need arises.

So just how do we get this piece of silicon to do our bidding? In this case - flash

a LED.

Fundamentally, the PIC needs three things to make it work.

1) 5 volt power source.

2) Clock source

3) Software

The 5 volt supply is there to power the chip. The clock source gives the chip the

ability to process instructions. The software is a list of instructions that we

create. The PIC will follow these to the letter with no exceptions, so we must

make sure that they are written correctly

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