Microchip’s PIC Development For IPhone And IPod

March 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

It seems a bit late to the party, but Microchip has just announced a family of PIC development boards for Apple products. The three offerings include a digital audio development kit, 8-bit accessory development and charging kit, and a 16-bit accessory development and charging kit for iPhone or iPod.

We’ve seen a lot of homebrew Apple addons that use microcontrollers. This not only takes the hardware interface to the next level, it does it with Apple’s blessing. But somehow that doesn’t seem like quite as much fun.

[Thanks Juan]

PIC Based USB Input Devices

March 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

USB is convenient and that makes it desirable in many many projects. [Simon Inns] has the process down and is sharing it with his recent PIC based USB tutorial. Prompted by requests for help on the matter after having published a post about his Commodore 64 interface, he set out to detail the particulars when it comes to using the PIC 18F family as USB input devices. This example uses a PIC 18F4550 with the circuit built on a breadboard. There’s not much required here, an oscillator, a few passives, and a USB B connector. The magic really happens in the code. Take a look at this well-written guide and give it a try with your next project.

Don’t need USB? [Simon’s] game hack, the Ultimate Simon is always worth another look too.

Storage For Your Hacking Needs

March 14, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 18 Comments

Sometimes your project needs a lot of non-volatile ROM, right on cue [Matthew] let us know how to not only connect, interface, read, and write to SD cards with a PIC over serial, but also how to do the above mentioned with an old PATA HDD. For those without a PIC/serial connection don’t fret, [nada] let us know about his Bus Pirate SD card hack, of which our personal favorite part is the creative use of an old 5.25″ floppy connector as the SD card socket.

Looping Foot Pedal

February 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

This guitar pedal can record, playback, and modify samples. [Colin Merkel], also know for his work on electronic door locks, built this to replicate some guitar effects he heard in recordings. By tapping the button at the bottom with your foot the device begins recording. Another tap stops the recording and starts the loop. That’s where the rest of the controls take over, with settings to adjust the speed of playback, volume, and the type of playback looping. The video after the break gives a great demonstration of these features.

[Colin] built this around a PIC 18F877A with a 256k RAM chip to store the sample. There’s a bunch of other components that go into this and we’re dumbfounded that he built it on protoboard. This would be a multi-breadboard prototype for us and we wouldn’t think twice about laying out and etching our own PCB. He admits that the point-to-point soldering stretched his skills to the limit but he doesn’t say how many hours it took to get the circuit up and running. This is a great addition to the cool guitar pedals we’ve seen here.

Continue reading “Looping Foot Pedal” →

PIC Pong Clock

February 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Andrew] built this pong clock over the span of a couple of days. The PIC 18f2520 he used can serve as a real time clock with the addition of an external clock crystal. His project proves the usefulness of an oscilloscope as poor board layout caused interference in the crystal connections, something difficult to troubleshoot without this handy lab tool.

Pong clocks have been quite popular. This one is nice because it’s easy to throw together now that [Andrew’s] done the coding work for you. Written in assembly, reading and understanding his code might be a good exercise if your low-level language skills are lacking.

Use An Analog Oscilloscope To Display Digital Logic

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

[Mike Bradley] wanted to use his oscilloscope to display 8 channels of digital signals. Alas, the analog unit didn’t have this capability. Not to worry, he threw together an adapter module that does the trick. Using a PIC 18F26K20 microcontroller he inputs four or eight channel digital logic (at 5V) and filters the output to an analog signal that the oscilloscope can interpret. What you see in the photo above is the result.

The UltimateSIMON

January 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Simon Inns] designed a circuit board to retrofit an original Simon electronic game. This hack is immediately a win because he made sure that his design required no modification of the original case. The new PCB has many improvements. It moves the device from using 2 D-cells over to a 9 volt battery, the incandescent bulbs were out swapped out for three LEDs per button, and the use of tactile switches makes the buttons a lot more responsive (but does require a bit of modification to the colored button covers). Under the hood there’s a PIC18F2550 controlling a serial LED chip and handling input monitoring and sound generation. The video after the break is safe to watch at work, there’s no swearing involved this time. Continue reading “The UltimateSIMON” →