![\"PIC](\"http:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/engineer\/pic\/misc-circuits.jpg\")
\nI’ve been hardware hacking recently, back using PIC microcontrollers. I have a few specific things I’d like to build – temperature sensor network, and metal lathe tachometer. But so far, I’ve just been getting back up to speed with all my bits & bobs. Hardware is brutually binary. It either works or it doesn’t. Typically, each circuit spends an evening in “doesn’t work” and then the next evening I immediately realise my mistake and it springs into “working” mode.<\/p>\n
So far, I’ve built working circuits for:<\/p>\n
So, a reasonable wander around the world of digital electronics. Fortunately, I still had my “no part” PIC programmer from a few years back, although it took a while to find a PC which still has a parallel port, and took even longer to remember that it had to be set to SPP mode in the bios. Oh, and I don’t own a separate keyboard anymore, so changing BIOS settings was tricky.<\/p>\n
Electronics is so unforgiving compared to software. Here’s a list of mistakes I’ve made – several times, usually:<\/p>\n
Anyhow, I now have an LCD screen working so I can get pretty output from my PIC rather than interpreting LEDs. Plus, I’m replacing my aging 16F84’s with newer 16F88’s. These have UARTs for serial comms, plus you can run a bootloader on them which simplifies programming greatly. In order to retire my parallel port, I’ve ordered an FTDI232 USB< ->serial breakout board. <\/p>\n
My next project is to make a tachometer to measure the spindle speed on my lathe by using a metal disc with holes drilled round the edge. An LED shines through the hole onto a photo-transistor, and the PIC can measure the period of these pulses and hence the rotation speed. Then, with a few input buttons to allow me to set the material diameter, the PIC can also calculate the surface speed of the rotating material. This falls into the “kinda interesting, but not really necessary” category of projects. In other words, perfect hobby material.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been hardware hacking recently, back using PIC microcontrollers. I have a few specific things I’d like to build – temperature sensor network, and metal lathe tachometer. But so far, I’ve just been getting back up to speed with all my bits & bobs. Hardware is brutually binary. It either works or it doesn’t. Typically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}