Thanks for the replies.
Well, in answer to Nigel’s question of why I wanted to do this... I happened to dig out my old StampBug toy thingy and found that I have a nice BASIC compiler for PIC's, which as far as I know are quite cheap. I thought that this would be a good way to start writing programs in basic without having to pay large amounts of money for either PICBasic, but then I realised that the PIC chip used on the StampBug is a 16C56 which has no EEPROM built in and has no UV window for erasing the chips contents. But according to my instruction manual I should be able to change the program that is already there and replace it with my own.
There is a 93LC56 EEPROM chip on the StampBug as well, but I thought that was only for holding data, but I couldn’t quite understand how that would let me replace the currently installed program unless the PIC was pre programmed to just run a program from the EEPROM, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now.
Anyway, as a follow up question I have found that there are quite a few PIC's in the 16F... range that say that compilers which are recommended for use with these chips have a "Parallax BASIC Stamp 1 compatible instruction set" I'm guessing that means they have the same machine code instruction set as my 16C56 chip and if so then I can use my compiler that I got with stampBug to program these chips to...
This leads me to ask another question...
My stampBug has got hardly anything on it. Apart from the servo's, LED's, Touch sensors and on switch (which I'm pretty sure aren’t necessary to program the PIC) all there is are the PIC chip, the EEPROM, Resonator, 1 transistor, 1 capacitor and a few resistors. The StampBug connects to the PC's parallel port via a 3 Pin connector on the stampBug... So, it would seem to me that it would be very simple & cheap to make a board that I could plug some of those 16F's into and program with the software I've already got. If so can someone let me know what it is that needs to be done? Should I just build something the same as the stampBug and miss out the Servo's etc, and would I need to include the EEPROM or not. Anyway... thanks very much for reading and if I have got very confused along the way and started talking crap please let me know.
Cheers
- Steve -