Here are some shots of my PICDesigner prototype. Each small image links to a large detail.
This is the PIC Designer. It's primary purpose is to serve as an experimenter's station that sits on my desk so that I can get new PIC based project designs going quickly. I've found that ideas come and go often because there really isn't time to stop and build/wire a board to work out the idea. But with the PIC Designer, it's like a virtual PIC project breadboard which you can quickly test out an idea while it's still fresh.
This is the front panel. The idea is to hang a handful of common interface periperals that are connected to the PIC. Currently the front panel has the following items wired:
- 9x7 segment multiplexed calculator LCD display.
- 10 bar LED bargraph display. Both display's anodes are wired to PORTD of the PIC, with the 7445 decoder selecting the display.
- 10K pot/knob wired between +5/GND to give analog front panel input. It's wired to a PIC ADC interface. I'll probably add a simple opamp voltage follower in order to give the PIC ADC input a constant impeadance.
- Black pushbutton (PB) is a general purpose switch input. I've worked out a pretty good user interface using just the pot and a switch. To set a value (like hours/minutes on a clock for example) you can use the pot to pick the value you're interested in, then the PB for select.
- Reset switch. It's supposed to be the round red one in the center of the panel. But AFTER wiring it I found out that it's a normally closed pushbutton instead of normally open. DOH! So for the time being (March 26, 2004) I wired it to the black PB which is normally open. Fortunately the main board has a hex inverter which I use for the TLVP interface. So I can invert the signal from the red button and still use it for reset.
- Green LED is power.
- Square Red switch is the power switch.
- Teminals on the bottom are +5 and GND so that you can attach a logic probe or the like to the board.
There are a couple of items I'd still like to add:
- An LCD or vacuum florescent display. Need to find room.
- A rotary quadriture encoder that serves a similar purpose to the pot/switch combo above.
- An IR decoder interface for doing IR projects.
Here's a couple of interior shots of the main protoboard. Right now it's pretty sparse. Moving clockwise from the 40 pin ribbon cable in the 9 O'clock (OC) position:
- That ribbon cable is the interface to the front panel. Currently half the cable is grounded, while the other half beings signals from the various panel components.
- The 2N2222 transistor at the 10-OC position and the resistor are the MCLR interface for the ZPL bootloader. They are wired to the serial port cable that sits at 12-OC.
- Right above the PIC is a diode and pullup resistor for MCLR. This MCLR interface is for the TLVP programmer which sits...
- ... in the 3-OC position starting with the parallel port cable.
It also consist of the 74HCT14 hex inverter sitting to the left of the PIC, the AC clock line terminator resistor/cap sitting to the left of the parallel cable at 3-OC and the previously mentioned diode/pullup for MCLR.
- The metal oscillator can is 8 Mhz. I'm testing at the frequency because I plan to run ZPL at 8 Mhz, as most of the targets have the nanowatt INTRC that can run at that speed.
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