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Newbie needs advice

HI Guys i am new here and to PICS in general my history is in Power electronics rather than digital/ microprocessors but i have been asked to try to design a controller for my friend so thought it would be a good excuse to learn PIC programming.

I have brought a couple of books and have been scanning the internet but i wondered if anyone could give me some pointers to some links that may help me with this project.

The Project is to build a hand held controller for a large mechanical clock that i have got my hands on. it is addressed by RS422 2400 baud, 7 data bits, no parity, 2 stop bits. i have the data string as well somewhere.

the controller will need a LCD display a newmeric keypad and three other butons.

The display will show competitor number (three digits) and faults (2 digits) and also timing manual start but i would like to add an option latter of a triggered start.

Which PIC would people reccomend

can anyone point me at a few links or comments here please.

Many Thanks

Alan

Reply to
Alan
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MeLabs. Not free but was easy to get going right away on projects. M

Reply to
ChadMan

All depends on what you want to achieve in the end. Are you programming in assembler or C?. If programming in C then nows a good time to start using the PIC18F series as Microchip have provided a free student download for the C18 compiler (only optimisation limited after a certain number of days). Will you be designing your own board or are you looking for a pre-built board with as much of your required functionality as possible?.

Also, if you aren't sure if you'll have enough code space to fit your design into, either choose a big part to start with or socket your micro. That way its easier to upgrade should you need to. I always use the biggest part I have and when the project is finished, drop in a part that more fits the bill.

I have recently used the small pic boards at

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as it gets you up and running quickly and is easilly changeable. But if you want to do the whole project youself then maybie just stick with smaller DIP parts.

My opinion. Go PIC18 for C (and get an ICD2 debugger from somewhere).

Reply to
Roger

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