Microchip added some new cheapie chips to the PIC24F family of 16bit microcontrollers, the ‘KL’ series. They come in 14, 20, and 28 pin packages, and some cost less than a buck in quantity: The PIC24F ‘KL’ family was developed … Read more
The Bus Pirate is a handy debugging tool, but it’s also a 16 bit PIC 24FJ64GA002 development board. You don’t need a programmer to play, just upload the firmware over USB using the Bus Pirate’s nearly-impossible-to-brick bootloader. It’s easy to … Read more
Low-speed USB using bit banging for small PIC16F chips, similar what the V-USB project does for AVRs: The 16FUSB is a software implementation of the USB low-speed for PIC16F628/628A microcontroller. All communication stuff is done by the firmware, completely discarding … Read more
Pinguino, the open source IDE for PIC-based Arduino compatible boards, just released version X.3. Software is still in beta testing mode, so if you run into a bug be sure to contact the developers about it. PinguinoX.3 is now available … Read more
Dpropicweb tipped us to a new Open source Bluetooth stack for PIC24 and PIC32. For hardware, a PIC drives a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle using a USB host interface. The Bluetooth part is open source, unfortunately is also uses Microchips … Read more
If you miss the Defcon electronic badge hacking it’s a good idea to check out the offerings of some of the lesser known cons. The recently concluded Notacon 9 in Cleveland, OH presented a badge based on the PIC 8-bit … Read more
Chris from PyroElectro writes: Here’s an article that explains how to build a dual DC motor control system, combined with a wireless receiver and transmitter (XBee modules) which tell the motors at what speed they should move forward, or backward. … Read more
LEDs don’t dim well using a an adjustable resistor, instead a pulse-width modulator is usually used to blink them rapidly giving the appearance of less light. Giovanni brings the analog charm back to LED dimming by controlling brightness via an … Read more
The Bus Pirate PIC programming adapter is back in stock at Seeed. It enables a Bus Pirate v3 (only!) to program PIC 12/16/18Fs that need a 13volt hit on MCLR to enter programming mode. You can program PIC 18FxxJ/24/30/33F without … Read more
Hak8or writes regarding his experiences with pic32prog, a flash programming utility for Microchip PIC32 microcontrollers. For everyone who is still stuck with a PICKIT2, like me, instead of buying a pickit3 we can all use this with a PICKIT2 to … Read more
Olimex has introduced the Duinomite line of dev boards. DuinoMite is a MaxiMite Compatible Basic computer, originally designed by Geoff Graham, with additional features and Arduino shield-like layout. DuinoMite allows you to program in the BASIC language and have VGA … Read more
Microchip is about to release the PIC16F145X family of microcontrollers. This little guy is advertised to have Full-Speed USB capability without the need of the usual external oscillator. From the product brief it appears that this uC will use the … Read more
We’ve been researching various component testers, and BrentBXR tipped us about this high-resolution capacitor meter. It’s accuracy is claimed to be around 0.2%, which is much lower than typical capacitor tolerances. Internal comparators in a PIC16F628 create an oscillator with … Read more
Raj writes to inform us of his Embedded Lab tutorial with tips on using the Fixed Voltage Reference (FVR) module in enhanced mid-range 8-bit PIC microcontrollers for a precise and accurate A/D conversion. Raj demos how to use the built-in … Read more
A spirit level is an “an instrument designed to indicate whether a surface is horizontal (level) or vertical (plumb).” Here’s a demo by Shawon Shahryiar of an electronic spirit level made using a Microchip PIC16F684, a SCA610 accelerometer and a … Read more
This application note describes four methods of playing a video file using a PIC microcontroller (MCU) and hardware solutions available from Microchip. Methods discussed include video playback on PIC32 using upscaling by interpolation, streaming raw video from a micro-SD card … Read more
If you’re at that stage as a beginner where you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes on an Arduino board you should check out jumperone’s tutorial on using microcontrollers. There you’ll learn what’s needed to take a bare microcontroller … Read more
Arup built a PICkit2 clone, to get it to work, he previously had to build a JDM2 serial port programmer to upload firmware into the PICKIT2 onboard PIC18F2550. I have built Ian’s JDM2 programmer and the same PK2clone from same site, … Read more
While rummaging through the Microchip site, Octal stumbled across new PIC32 chips in 28 Pin through-hole packages. All the chips marked with 28 pins have a SPDIP version. Some are in production right now, although their SPDIP versions are not … Read more
Debraj has been working on this project for DTMF decoding using the Goertzel algorithm on a PIC. Goertzel algorithm is well known in the DSP domain. It is used to detect the presence of a frequency or a number of … Read more
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