James Thorpe

Jul 24, 2020 electronics pic

It's been a while since the last post about my PIC project, and a fair bit has been achieved and changed since, so let's have a quick run through of what those things are!

Aug 14, 2019 electronics pic

Once again, this post is a bit overdue. But, progress!

May 12, 2019 electronics pic

It's been far longer than I intended to post this follow up. I received my order of PICs and the PICkit 4 some time ago, and set to playing.

First up, downloading the software. Microchip provide MPLAB X for free to work with their chips, and I saw no reason not to use it. When you start it up and create a new project, you can choose exactly which chip you're targetting. In my case this is the PIC18F27K42, which seemed to be a good balance of not too many pins plus had more than one UART, so I can potentially practice chaining them together in a communication array (remember, at some point I'm supposed to be working towards having 4 neighbours on each block, but I'm still learning to walk here, so 2 is plenty).

After choosing the chip type, you can then select the programmer you're intending to use - in my case the PICkit 4 - followed by the compiler you wish to use. There seems to be a choice of 2, those being C18 and XC8. A bit of googling led me to use XC8, simply because it's the newer one and appears to be the way things are heading. I'm sure there are reasons to pick the old one if you need it, but I'm unaware of what those reasons might be so stuck with "newer is better"!

Jan 04, 2019 electronics pic

In my first post after the website reboot, I said:

Well, here we go.