Re: PIC under Linux developpement Howto newbie

Hello people on this list;

I am a linux user and I am starting to learn pics. I would like a 
tutorial so I don't have to bother other people
with simple/stupid questions. Like 'what programmer', 'what is a 
programmer', and 'how to make a serial connection'

Nobody in my close (learning) environment has told me to use assembler, 
some on the net do, some don't, this is al  hard to make up my mind 
about. If you would like to know what a newbie who's new to the subject 
and wants to use linux in the whole process, needs and tries to achieve, 
here are my suggestions:

A tutorial covering the fist steps, like what programmer, what 
programming software, assembler basics, do's and don'ts, blink a led, 
connect a max232, reading in serial output from the pic on a linux 
machine ( minicom -l I found ) would be very helpful for beginners. I am 
currently unraveling this information step by step.
If this tutorial would be applicable to a wider range of pics, more 
people could learn from this:

Sometimes you just 'get' a pic from someone, sometimes you're forced to 
use one by a university that gives you software to use in school but not 
at home. I mean, sometimes you don't even know what to get, only that 
you have to finish it in 5 weeks time, and the electronics shops aren't 
very helpful or don't have it onstock.

A second part about sensing the outside world, controlling dc motors, 
doing ir communication, midi, could be pic specific.

The beginner can search the wiki to find out what pic to start with by 
looking at examples. the first steps are pic independent so that's 
already covered.

splitting up this information has following advantages:

Like I was told, different projects have different (pic) needs. Covering 
multiple pics in the first part gives you a starting point to write 
other documentation on, for specific types of pic's.

It would be like reading a book: first, you learn what applies to all of 
them, and how to get 'going', then you learn what your specific needs 
are. If you start reading in the back of the book, you could order the 
hardware,  and flip in the beginning to get things working lateron 
without problems.

only one last thing:  I learned that a pic16f84 is 'old' ( by looking at 
the creation dates of the html pages) 90% of the documentation is 
written for this, but I can't get it anymore in any local shops, this is 
confusing.

I am an art/mediatechnology student. I have limited programming 
skills(perl) and I wouldn't mind learning assembler. I'm now doing 
things in jal, but it's just as new as assembler would be.


Hope I didn't open my big mouth just to cause annoyance,

regards,

Matthijs.

Christopher Bergeron wrote:
> I'm going to have to second this one.  However, there's a part of me 
> that thinks that having choices will be confusing to newbies.
> 
> Kind regards,
> -CB
> 
> 
> 
> Peter Onion wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 17:23 -0400, Sergey A. Dryga wrote:
>>
>>  
>>
>>> I have to disagree with "one language - a relocatable assembler" option.
>>> If a newbie is an EE student, that's fine he or she will have to learn
>>> assembler anyway.  But for a hobbyist, higher level language is much
>>> easier, or maybe even familiar.   
>>
>>
>> If they want to use "C" then fine, but they shouldn't be comming to a
>> "gputils" list for help.
>>
>> Bearing in mind we probably won't have a huge number of contributors to
>> this, I think we need to be very focused on what we are trying to
>> achieve.  Since the focus of this list is "gputils", and since that
>> doesn't include a C compiler, then I agree with "one language - a
>> relocatable assembler".
>>
>> Plus, you really need a detailed understanding of the PIC architecture
>> to make the best of it's limited facilities, and you aren't going to get
>> that using "C".
>> Peter
>>
>>
>>
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