Larry's Blog

AMAZING BREAK-THROUGHS !!!

HERE ARE THE BREAKTHROUGHS
(1) MY SPEAKING COUNTER WILL NOW COUNT CONTINUOUSLY TO 999
(2) MY PIC PROGRAMMER SOFTWARE NOW OPERATES A HUNDRED
TIMES FASTER!!
(3) MY DOS BATCH FILE NOW RUNS WITHOUT ANY INTERVENTION FROM
ASSEMBING THE PROGRAM THROUGH PRE-ERASING THE PIC, WRITING THE CONFIGURATION WORD, CREATING THE INTERMEDIATE FILE, TO LOADING THE PROGRAM ONTO THE PIC. IT ALL HAPPENS IN 15 TO 20 SECONDS.

THE SPEAKING COUNTER
The speaking counter uses 8 bytes of storage to contain 8 binary-coded decimal (BCD) numbers with a capacity of 99,999,999. The code for maintaining this counter is fully in place, but the logic for playing the numeric messages only foes up to 999 at the present time. I've had it count up to 275 so far. There is still work to be done on the delays and connecting between the messages involved.
"one" "hundred" "seventy" "one" has 4 messages for 171.

PIC PROGRAMMER 100 TIMES FASTER
To program the PICs, I use a Qbasic language pgm of my own, and an older PC laptop. The pgm sends control signals via the printer port and some TTL buffering to the PIC chip. The main signals are the clock and data lines which contain the
programming commands and the data of the PIC assembler pgm to be loaded.
I encountered a difficulty in that I was forced to enter one instruction, then to go out of programming mode and back in for the next instruction. I believe I was not allowing enough time (10 msec) after the "program one cycle" commands.
Well I made some changes and included the necessary delay and now I can just stay in programming mode.

DOS BATCH FILE COMPLETELY AUTOMATIC
I discovered that ther is a Basic command called SYSTEM. It closes all open files and returns control to the operating system. Before I used the command STOP.
But for this I had to intervene to get back into DOS. Now the batch file is completely automatic.