Re: Learning PIC on the job

On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 08:37 +0100, Nicholas Robinson wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I'm completely new to PIC.

We all were once :-)

> I would be really grateful for some pointers as to 
> which technologies/devices I should use so that I can target my learning 
> towards my goal!

Have you looked at the liclist site ? And subscribed to that list as
well ?  It has a wider scope than this list and I think it includes more
electronics engineers than this list.

> The controlling application resides on a Linux notebook PC (or PDA???) using 
> C++/Qt with a wired connection to a master PIC-based device.

I'm just doing something similar, but with C/Gtk+ 

[SNIP system description]

> 
> Any suggestions as to the best way to take this forward for someone based in 
> the UK in terms of programmers/test kits, etc. would be most helpful.

UK suppliers I've used for PIC stuff:  Crownhill Associates, Rapid
Electronics.  Crownhill have some modules that may be useful for
learning (PIC based WiFi web server for example).

I don't want to put you off, but by anyones standards what you have
described is a really quite complex pic project !  My advice, take some
time to "play" with some simple pic circuits first.  Have you "blinked a
led" yet ?

You can start to experiment with pic programming before you even get any
hardware together by using gpsim.   gputils plus gpsim will let you
start to get the feel for things.

Even if you end up using a high level language like C (I'm playing with
sdcc at the moment but other high level languages are available ;-) ) I
would make the effort to at least learn the basics of assembly language
programming.  It WILL help when things don't do what you expect.

I would also suggest that since you have no "legacy code/hardware" to
worry about that you look at the 16 bit 18FXXXX series devices.

> I have tried to make some guesses but I'd probably only embarrass myself if I 
> included them here!

Well your guesses would at least give us an idea of your level of
knowledge, for example if you use all the right words etc ;-) 



Peter