December 15, 2007 UPDATE  NEW DEVELOPEMENT BOARD

I've been using the ET-Base 8722 board for the past 6 months. I find it much easier to use than the one below. Check it out. I got mine at FUTURLEC. It has 10 pin IDC connectors on board for all ports. Even includes LCD, PWM and 2 RS-232 ports.

MICROCHIP PIC Microcontrollers

I've been working with 8 bit PIC microcontrollers for several years and recently migrated to the 16 bit devices. I decided to start with the 18F8722. The HPC Explorer Development board is very reasonable and gives the user a chance to get used to the new 16 bit instructions. As of now I have only been working with the 8722 for about a month. The first attempt was successful but only after redoing some previous code used in a 16F873 project. The first try resulted in walking the LED's back and forth on the demo board. This simple task was to make sure the chip was programming OK from the PC. The board is driven by free software from Microchip. My setup seems to be working well and I can get on to bigger smarter programs. The menu above will direct you to other PIC projects and their source code.

I now have my code template set up right. There are new directives concerning config data and that had to be fixed up. Where the 8 bit PIC's had a single line of config data, the new 16 bit has several lines of data. The 16 bit code looks just like the earlier code right now because I have not used anything working with 16 bit instruction. The 16 bit instructions concern memory addresses for the most part. I'll get some of my code here on the site within a few days. Nothing fancy. There is a frequency counter I made for a Yaesu FT-101E that also changes  bands.

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The HPC Explorer Demo Board

This is the first time I have bought a developement board. I usually make my own but this board was less than $60 and has four I/O devices built in. (See here for my latest PIC programmer) There are 8 LEDs that you can manipulate. You also get a temperature device, an analog pot and a button. These are all at your control and make development a snap. Of course your application may not use any of those features but it is highly likely you will.

As you can see the 18F8722 ( The small black square.) is very small. It is actually an 80 pin device and is surface mounted. The chips are about $10 each and must be soldered to your PCBoard. I think I can do it with a stereo microscope that I use  occasionally. I 've got to get some micro size soldering tips or perhaps a new surface mount station. The new soldering stations are about $200. I'll see if I can do with my own equipment although it may be just too small to use a soldering iron.

THIS DEMO BOARD IS A GREAT TOOL. A PERFECT DEVELOPEMENT BOARD FOR THE BEGINNER.

THE PIC BOOTLOADER AND MY PROBLEMS WITH THIS BOARD

When I began working with this board the main demo program was working as specified. All the features were there and working except for the bootloader. A bootloader allows the user to have an interface to the PC to monitor program operation. It can do a lot more but thats the purpose I need. The bootloader fuctions between the PC software..a modem program called HyPerTerminal and the demo or users program ( if the user program is programmed to function as an I/O source ). I wanted to test the programming ability of my setup so it was necessary to enter the boot mode and erase the demo program. The program was in the software so I could erase the old and put it back in the chip.

I could not get the setup to enter the bootmode as specified in the instructions. A companion software utility could not connect to the demo board and therefore I could not erase the demo program and enter my own. The problem was so severe I called Microchip and they sent me another board. This time I made an effort to set up the board exactly as specified. Well the board still wouldn't go into the boot mode. I eventually found the problem and it turned out to be a COCKPIT error. The answer was simply in the port setting and the order in which certain tasks were performed. I got it working fine and was able to erase the demo program and reinstall it. I went on to write a small test program to walk the LED's back and forth.

Thanks for stopping by..................