Larry's Blog

TACTICAL RETREAT

Coincidental with getting a bad cold and disorienting dreams with psuedo computer & electronic stuff woven in, I have considered it time to take
a tactical retreat and an assessment of where I am working with the
PIC microcontroller.

Some of my accomplishments at the present time are as follows. I will begin with QBASIC programs that I have developed:

1. a load prm which reads from a hex file onto the PIC. It is slow but it works.

2. a verify pgm which reads out the instructions that have been written onto the EEPROM memory

3. a pgm which writes a new configuration word

4. a pgm which reads the pgm IDENT area and the config word

5. a pgm that creates a table or series of bytes in the EEPROM data memory area

6. a pgm to reads out EEPROM mem data & creates disk file called tableout.dat

7. Certainly not least, I have created an ASSEMBLER for appropriate text files written in PIC16F628 assembler language. Constraints: labels must begin in loc 1, opcodes in loc 9, & operands in 17. There are 2 out files: a .hex file and a .prt file which also includes the hex obj data

In the area of assembler code, I have come up with the following

1. dlymin, dlymed & dlymax which creates delays from 0 to 114 usecs,
from 114 usecs to 2 msecs, and from 2 msecs to about 45 secs respectively

2. I've installed code (not trivial) for accessing EEPROM data mem by PIC pgms

3. I've set up 2 PICS to talk to each other. One creates musical tones, the other
provides the delay controlling the duration of the tones

some feedback for my BLOG

Alex Mc Leod viewed my blog and had this comment:
Viewed your BLOG and liked it very much….. especially the poetry!!! Keep up the good work. 73’s. Alex

Alex's ancestors hail from the Hebrides or at least one of the islands off Scotland. He is either Welsh or Scottish. A real engineer ready to take on any electronic questions. He has worked in the US for many, many years but has interesting experiences from world war II when he lived in south west England. There were some vital submarine bases there or shipyards and he experienced the German air raids first hand. He and his wife live in North Reading, MA.

I hope to have other viewers ask me questions and give me ideas in my electronic and electro-mechanical adventures.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT ME

Let's see if this works!
My e-mail address is

lvkeegan@comcast.net

you might have some questions or comments

CREATING A TABLE ON THE PIC

Today I have created a TABLE similar to an array on my PIC.
But note that this is not just a list of bytes in RAM, but bytes in
the EEPROM DATA memory. Program memory is for 14 bit
instructions, but EEPROM data memory is in bytes.

I created a program in QBASIC that creates a table. It is called
MAKETABL.BAS. There is another program READTABL.BAS.
These programs use PIC programming commands the same
as those used to enter the main program onto the PIC.

Next I have created a program READPROM.ASM which reads the
table out of the EEPROM . The code for this is more complicated than you would imagine, but I have successfully done it. I am planning to use a table for setting the tones in a musical tone generator. I should eventually be able to send out to a small speaker via a transistor interface aome nusrsery rhyme songs or perhaps a rendition of Westminster chimes.