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It's alive!
Posted by Chris
on
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Like Dr Frankenstein on a stormy night, tonight I looked over my very own living breathing monster creation. Well, that's a bit over the top, granted, but it's been such a long time coming, that's how it felt when a few LEDs finally flickered into life this evening!
Following the arrival (finally) of a PIC programmer (although not the one I'd originally ordered) I couldn't wait to try out the whole host of applications I'd been coding and testing in the PIC simulator.
Disappointing didn't cover it.
Nothing. Zilch. Nought. Nada.
Each and every bit of code I tried resulted in a blank, no lights, no response to inputs, nothing to even suggest that the PIC microcontroller was running at all! So another frustrating few hours ensued, with the code snippets getting smaller and simpler, until even a simple routine which said "turn the pins to outputs, turn on pin 1, repeat" failed to produce even a flicker.
A trawl through the datasheet turned up something that I'd overlooked - and had resulted in the PIC forever resetting itself, giving the impression that nothing was happening - the set-up "fuses".
After disabling a couple of reset parameters, the first LED winked into life!
A bit of poking about in the code and re-programming the chip a few dozen times, and suddenly it was working! Working exactly as it had been programmed to. It didn't really do much, but what it did, it did perfectly - every time!
Check out the project page and forum discussion for more details and pictures!
Following the arrival (finally) of a PIC programmer (although not the one I'd originally ordered) I couldn't wait to try out the whole host of applications I'd been coding and testing in the PIC simulator.
Disappointing didn't cover it.
Nothing. Zilch. Nought. Nada.
Each and every bit of code I tried resulted in a blank, no lights, no response to inputs, nothing to even suggest that the PIC microcontroller was running at all! So another frustrating few hours ensued, with the code snippets getting smaller and simpler, until even a simple routine which said "turn the pins to outputs, turn on pin 1, repeat" failed to produce even a flicker.
A trawl through the datasheet turned up something that I'd overlooked - and had resulted in the PIC forever resetting itself, giving the impression that nothing was happening - the set-up "fuses".
After disabling a couple of reset parameters, the first LED winked into life!
A bit of poking about in the code and re-programming the chip a few dozen times, and suddenly it was working! Working exactly as it had been programmed to. It didn't really do much, but what it did, it did perfectly - every time!
Check out the project page and forum discussion for more details and pictures!
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