microchip

57 Articles

Microchip Puts Up Two $1000 Prizes For USB And TCP/IP Stacks!

September 15, 2011 by 37 Comments

microchip_call_for_open_source

A couple of weeks ago we put up a post titled Addressing Microchip’s open source problem where we talked about some of their shortcomings as far as open source code goes, specifically the TCP/IP stack and the USB stack. The comments were predictably fairly negative. The interesting part here is that Microchip actually listened. If you read through all of the comments, you will get a bit of an inside look at what is going on internally at Microchip. At the very end, [Marc] from Microchip left a couple of comments outlining a pair of prizes for independently ported stacks for TCP/IP and USB. Microchip can’t fully open the ones that they have because of legal reasons so they need the help of the development community and they are putting up $1000 for each one to prove that they are serious. If you follow this link you will arrive at a page outlining the rules for the contest.

The gauntlet has been dropped! Do you have chops to pull this off and earn yourself a cool $1000?

Addressing Microchip’s Open Source Problem

August 31, 2011 by 77 Comments

microchip_call_for_open_source

Hackaday alum and owner of Dangerous Prototypes [Ian Lesnet] recently wrote an editorial piece calling out Microchip on some of their less than friendly attitudes towards open source.

[Ian] and his company use PIC microcontrollers extensively in their projects, and they have quite a high opinion of their products overall. The gripe that he has (and thinks you should have too) is regarding Microchip’s approach to open source.

You see, Microchip invested in the Arduino IDE and released the chipKIT, a 32-bit Arduino compatible development board, along with big promises of “playing nice” with the open source community. The problem, according to [Ian], is that while Microchip’s compilers are based on GCC, they “keep some special sauce locked up”, which means that certain parts of the chipKIT toolchain are not open. Many in the community, including [Ian] had high hopes for the chipKIT based on the successes seen by Atmel’s open source initiatives, but many things are still locked up behind closed licenses.

An example of this unfriendly attitude towards open source can be seen in Digilent’s recently released network shield. It supports Ethernet and USB features of the chipKIT MEGA, but the TCP/IP and USB stacks are completely closed source. Digilent pushed hard to get the ability to release open drivers for the board, but it was a battle they ultimately lost. This behavior creates roadblocks for seasoned developers of open source products such as Dangerous Prototypes, as well as the curious beginner, which is why [Ian] is making a point in bringing these issues to light.

[Ian] urges Microchip to give something significant back to the community they are tapping, a result which can only be achieved by speaking up. Be sure to check out his editorial, and if after reading it you have any interest in letting your voice be heard, drop Microchip a line and let them know that their one-way relationship with the open source community is something you would like see change.

Working With I2C Port Expanders

June 7, 2011 by 4 Comments

There are times when you don’t need much processing power for your project but you do need a lot of I/O pins. It often doesn’t make economic sense to choose a larger microcontroller just to get extra pins so the answer is to use a port expander chip. [Raendra] posted a guide for using one of these chips, it’s a Microchip MCP23008 chip that uses the I2C protocol for communications.

You are probably already familiar with using shift registers like the 595 series for port expansion. There can be benefits to using an I2C device instead. One of them comes when using multiple port expander chips. With cascading shift registers you must always shift in the data for the entire chain of chips. But I2C devices are individually addressable, so you only need to push data over the I2C bus for the chips that need to be changed, the others will remain unaffected. It is especially easy to use these if you already have another I2C device in your project design as the addition only requires the connection of the SDA and SCL lines. Keep them in mind for future undertakings.

BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32

May 21, 2011 by 25 Comments

If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code and quite a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar development tools are available for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

We first mentioned these a couple weeks ago, but the software was unavailable at the time. Seeing the development tools in action was quite unexpected…

Continue reading “BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32” →

What Development Board To Use? (Part Two)

February 14, 2011 by 43 Comments

We asked for responses to our last Development Board post, and you all followed through. We got comments, forum posts, and emails filled with your opinions. Like last time, there is no way we could cover every board, so here are a few more that seemed to be popular crowd choices. Feel free to keep sending us your favorite boards, we may end up featuring them at a later date!

Continue reading “What Development Board To Use? (Part Two)” →

MCP2200 USB To Serial Chip Hacked To Do Your Bidding

January 18, 2011 by 24 Comments

Mircrochip has a new USB to Serial converter available called the MCP2200. [Sjaak] suspected that it may have been made from an existing 20-pin PIC and found that reading the device signature with the PICKIT3 shows that the chip is an 18F14K50. Most likely this is running Microchip’s USB stack but it’s hard to tell because chip is code-protected, reading back all zeros. So he set out to write some replacement firmware which would provide the same functionality and give you access to the rest of the chip’s features.

There were some speed bumps along the way. The first one is that Microchip’s licensing for their USB stack won’t allow you to open source your firmware. That’s okay, it seems there is already a USB stack that can be ported which doesn’t have this restriction. The second wrinkle in the plan is that [Sjaak’s] code doesn’t come with a VID/PID pair that you can use like V-USB does for AVR chips. But that doesn’t diminish the accomplishment of getting the device to work by echoing back characters it receives. Full USB to serial support with the replacement firmware is on the way.

[Thanks Chris]

Designing An RF Transceiver

December 9, 2010 by 15 Comments

[William Dillon] is finishing up his degree. His final project as a student was to design an RF transceiver. He decided to work with the Microchip MRF49XA, which runs around $3 but will cost you $20 if you want it in a ready-to-use module. He didn’t find a lot of info on the Internet about communicating with these chips so he’s shared his design, code, and board files. If you’re ever wanted to delve into RF design this is a good primer. [William] talks about building around the example circuit from the datasheet but also includes a discussion of the calculations he made in working with the 434 MHz band, and an AVR-based library for using his module.