Tterev has done some beginners guides to pic’s, I think Toykeeper has stashed some of his work on the repository.
I think an adapter board would be the easiest way to tackle pic’s. Wight made one for the eight pin chips although I don’t think anyone ever finished the project.
Well… I dunno exactly when I’ll get around to porting the code, but I made a development board for the attiny816 (or 1616 / 3216). Basically the same at the 817 except it’s 20 pin instead of 24; I don’t plan on need 24 pins anytime soon. Instead of running through regulators or FETs, I’m just using the MCU output to run the LED (limited with resistors). Since this is just for testing, I don’t need it bright… actually, bright is bad because I’d just be blinding myself.
gchart, I’m not knocking you for threadjacking, because I’m just glad to see this development come to light. But this is very big news. It actually does deserve its own thread, if you can find the time.
I just cross-posted in my AVR Series-1 thread. I’ll try to continue posting updates over there. I just ordered the boards today, so it’ll be a little bit before they’re fully assembled. I guess I could start pulling code down and converting in the meantime… (like I really needed another thing to do )
That’s what FSM does. There’s a hardware interface on the back end, plus a UI toolkit on the front end. That way, the UI code is portable and doesn’t have to care (much) about the hardware it runs on.
However, it’s not exactly the cleanest code. It’s a spaghetti monster. It doesn’t do a great job of isolating the hardware-level parts from the library logic, so that gets kinda mixed in sometimes and could use cleaner abstractions. There’s probably a lot of stuff which doesn’t really make sense, but needs a fresh pair of eyes to notice the mess.
Thanks. I’ve been meaning to check on that project again, but I get distracted easily by other shiny things. It’s great to see that the code is available now, and published under GPLv3. There’s nothing wrong with arduino code though… I even used a couple arduino-isms while designing FSM’s interface. Anyway, it looks like loneoceans made things pretty clean.
I really like the flexibility of HQ’s programming key. There’s no reason you couldn’t adapt nearly any PCB design to use it (or some variation of it). I picked up 6ea from oshpark and can’t wait to try my hand at designing my own driver boards with integrated programming ports.
Thanks for open sourcing the design. I’ll probably try using kicad, so I’ll see if I can release some definitions for the footprint.
Are you already a user of KiCAD? I’d like to learn it, but the learning curve is steep for me. There is an Eagle tutorial around here from years ago, which helped a lot of us get started in PCB design. If you know how to use KiCAD, it would be helpful to at least some of us if you could help out with a quick-start tutorial of sorts. :innocent:
Never used kicad, I’ve used eagle a bit in the past. This is mainly a good excuse and project for me to get back into embedded electronics. I’ve been meaning to learn kicad for a while (not a huge fan of eagle since auto CAD bought them). I’ll definitely try to document my descent into the abyss!
Alternatively if there is another inexpensive part that allows me to go from the key to the USB ASP let me know. I have small gauge wires and extra jumper wires but nothing else.