Advice on reasonable priced pic dev kit/board wanted

Absolute Gold! seeing as the Amiga apparently had two modes, one was its own and the other IBM compatible. Also used serial and Centronics, as a added plus it seems old manuals come with all the details and dont try and hide stuff!
I know its sad but I am enjoying that pdf
Edit.

Just noticed appendix B has a printer control utility written in amega basic! I am liking the idea more and more

simple-simon said:

can you show me a link of what you mean by header sockets for the above please,

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The two large black sockets to the right of the plug-in MCU.

"Headers" (Pin headers) are generally square pins on a 0.1" spacing, used for interconnections or jumpers.
eg.


The ones on the explorer16/32 will take pin plugs like that or just offcuts of appropriate size component leads - mine has a couple in if for attaching scope probes.

The explorer 16 only has card edge connectors & no headers.
The socket would take a card with an edge connector similar to the one at the right edge of the main board, there is no easy way to connect to the device pins..

Thanks, I see what you mean now, Hmm could be a project in itself lol

My first printer way back when was a tractor-feed Epson MX-80. I don't think it was possible to kill the thing. Eventually, I gave it away and got an HP Deskjet.

Fun thing with parallel printers. I connected a daisywheel to the same parallel cable as the Deskjet. If only one or the other was turned on, they worked as expected. If both were on, they politely shared the printing; one would print one line, the other the next.

It seems a lot of theese printers have a reasonable amount of room for user generated charatcher sets as well, and that book maps out how to use each printer head pin

Ok I will start a new thread for this. It will become the end point of my first big project (after all the baby steps and so on). My end goal eventually was simply a data logger in a green house, but I do kind of like the idea of a once a day print out on listing paper for 12 hours lol.
I will slowly start researching and reading up but my main focus is the simple stuff first.

simple-simon said:

It would seem a not so bonkers idea, cheapo amiga 500 printers are around. But I also found a book online (free) called Amiga Printers inside out!! Seeing as a decent 18F should outrun a Amiga then i'm thinking game on

Noticed I could cheat and use a pic with a parrelel port on it.....just saying

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By definition PIC pins are automatically a 'parallel' port, it's just what you do with them. Printer ports on micros/computers were nothing 'special' just a general purpose I/O port (or two).

If you think an 18F can outrun an Amiga you're sadly mistaken, the Amiga was a seriously fast machine and greatly out performed IBM PC's from that era. The spec (by modern standards) might look low, but it was a full 32 bit machine and had a number of hardware co-processors for graphics, sound etc.

I presume if you google (try the PIC list) you'll find PIC code for printers out there - often for the small till style printers.

(quick google - )

Graphics on a 24 pin pin might be an issue, due to memory limitations.

simple-simon said:

Absolute Gold! seeing as the Amiga apparently had two modes, one was its own and the other IBM compatible.

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I've no idea what you're on about? - the Amiga just used a standard Centronics style port, and a standard serial port. I still have an A500 (original non-UK keyboard) and an A600 - I rescued the A600 as it was been dumped, and even came with a Star 24 pin printer.

Just been having a quick look round - the Epson LQ350 is 24 pin dot matrix printer, and comes with both parallel and RS232 connections, should make it fairly easy for you:


There's also the ESCP manual on that page above, so you can write a program to do what you want.

Not cheap though!!.

Quick addition - if you really like to make live hard for yourself!

I have actually owned one of those with a Amiga 500!! very easy to use printers that would work with most printer drivers selected. So that would be an excellent choice!

Nigel Goodwin said:

Quick addition - if you really like to make live hard for yourself!

https://www.microchip.com/wwwAppNotes/AppNotes.aspx?appnote=jp537372

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I think I better get a led flashing first

simple-simon said:

I think I better get a led flashing first

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A flashing LED is always{/u} a good first step to verify that you can program the chip and that it's actually running. Flash it on for 1000mS and off for 1000mS to verify clock speed too.

Way back I started with these .. should take PIC18 ?? https://cstech.co.uk/product/pic28/

Visitor said:

In the days before cheap circuit boards were available, I created a general-purpose circuit board for 28-pin 18F-series chips that I sold a good number of. Selling them not longer makes sense, because you can order 10 boards for $5 at a number of fab houses. The board has separate 6-pin connectors for ICSP, UART and I2C/SPI interfaces, and four 3-pin connectors for PWM, ADC and general purpose use.

Have a look at the attached PDF. If it's interesting, I'd be happy to send you the Gerber files so you can have the boards made yourself. Assembly is pretty simple, with all parts being through-hole except the USB connector, which is used for power only (there's also a terminal block for power).

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Very nice documentation, great work!

DerStrom8 said:

Very nice documentation, great work!

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Thank you. I can't believe it's been more than 10 years ago since I did that! A lot of effort just to get cheap boards

These boards have been a great building block for many projects. I have several different versions now, including one that adds a CH340 for a UART–USB interface.

I use these boards with Swordfish Basic, a very powerful, fast compiled language that is easy to use. If anybody is interested in Swordfish Basic, the "special edition" is free to download, and is so generous with memory limitations that many users never upgrade to the paid version.

So I got the exploer 16 board that I am buying from a member. Wow it is some bit of kit!!
So far its baby steps from scratch, just leds on at the moment and apart from the config file I am not using the code dooh dah yet! Had loads of problems lighting the leds, then I found the correct circuit diagram for the board and heay presto!!
So now to blink them!!

Have run into loads of problems, but a slow work through has got me this far without having to google the answer lol!
Its a simple start but my first ever pic24 and micros in general, plus learning C as I go, so I am well happy so far.
Looking at my pics .h file has helped alot with working commands out. The data sheets dont seem as good as the pic18f, some of the docs are all in short silly sections.

Thinking Simon you have perhaps thrown yourself in at the deep end a little , I have been 'playing' cpu, mpu since the 1970's with machine code , assembler, Basic, and for last 10 years 'C '. The PIC24 does not seem that popular with 'makers' and now most of the recent '16 and 18 devices are packed with the same (or more ) peripherals perhaps '24 is redundant, Having said that 16 bit PICs speed,( clocking is 2 cycles as opposed to 4 , so can be 70MIPS ! ) prog memory size up to 1024k , 5v if needed, and various pin outs (28 to 100 ish) make it my choice for most of my projects. likewise the dsPIC33 flavours too. The coding I find more intuative, re Interrupts, register manipulation and fits the C better. (in my amateur opinion) . I have not ventured into the MCC (Code configurator ) world but I can see it would provide useful examples . As for the Data sheets , guess they are not aimed at the hobbiest. and are good and bad with the explanations. But these days all I need are the pinouts on an A4 sheet ! or I just bring up a data sheet page on a second PC. A cheapo 8 chanel logic analyzer is an great Debug tool ( especially for comms problems ) MPLABX has settled down a bit since the early days, but still has its 'What the' moments. I run it on linux.mint and find it is so much better . Be ready for some late nights !

lol yes it was a late night! So far so good, I will be doing interrupts in the next day or 2. Looking at a couple of videos the MCC is a good tool, but I think I will learn more on the chips if I dont use it and keep at it for the data sheet. It just seems with pic 18f you get alot more info on registers than the pic24 parts, but that could be me.
I am taking it slowly but pleased so far with progress.

simple-simon said:

It just seems with pic 18f you get alot more info on registers than the pic24 parts, but that could be me.

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A lot of stuff in the device data sheets cross references to individual manuals or sections for each peripheral. The devices are modular and teh same module may be used in many different MCUs.

The "Family reference manual" sections are the master data, for want of a better name.

See here:

Also, this page may have useful links: