stormBytes
New Member
So I got on the scene a few weeks ago and started reading like crazy. I took an interest in the PIC flavor of micros mostly because of their price, availability, free tools from Microchip and of course their overwhelming popularity among hobby-engineers.
I scoured eBay and the forums looking for a decent development board and finally went with mikroelectronika's EasyPIC6. A couple of weeks went by and the board arrived in the mail. I've played with it for some weeks now and have come to the conclusion that there's absolutely nothing 'easy' about it. I've even contacted microE about returning the board for a refund. (they agreed to take it back, suggesting I first play with it for some weeks just to be sure)
So I went back to the boards, back to eBay, looking for alternatives. But sadly there don't really seem to be any! The EasyPIC6 is pretty well made, sort-of well supported and seems to be pretty popular. Any other (comparable) board costs about as much and don't appear to be any simpler.
I guess I'm looking for a nice board to prototype my projects. For the time being, I'm using MPLab/MPASM and reading through Gooligum's tutorials (pretty well put together). The thing that really gets me with the EasyPIC6 is that nothing seems to "just work". Just yesterday I placed an IC into one of the sockets, setup the jumpers. The PIC seems to work with their own PicFlash programmer software (and on-board programmer) but when I try to use my own ICD2 programmer/debugger through MPLab, using their own on-board RJ6 Ext PGM socket, I get an error. Also, I don't get their port mapping. I'm using an PIC12F683 which has GPIO. The EasyPic6 only has ports A-E and all sorts of LED's go off for no apparent reason.
THis is really frustrating!
Did I make a mistake purchasing this board?
Should I send it back and cash out?
Am I going to need a development board down the line? (What are some of the considerations to owning one, pro's/con's like?)
I'm looking to learn more, and develop all sorts of projects using LCDs, IC2, etc. I just need a little bit of direction in my learning.
Thanks for any help people!
I scoured eBay and the forums looking for a decent development board and finally went with mikroelectronika's EasyPIC6. A couple of weeks went by and the board arrived in the mail. I've played with it for some weeks now and have come to the conclusion that there's absolutely nothing 'easy' about it. I've even contacted microE about returning the board for a refund. (they agreed to take it back, suggesting I first play with it for some weeks just to be sure)
So I went back to the boards, back to eBay, looking for alternatives. But sadly there don't really seem to be any! The EasyPIC6 is pretty well made, sort-of well supported and seems to be pretty popular. Any other (comparable) board costs about as much and don't appear to be any simpler.
I guess I'm looking for a nice board to prototype my projects. For the time being, I'm using MPLab/MPASM and reading through Gooligum's tutorials (pretty well put together). The thing that really gets me with the EasyPIC6 is that nothing seems to "just work". Just yesterday I placed an IC into one of the sockets, setup the jumpers. The PIC seems to work with their own PicFlash programmer software (and on-board programmer) but when I try to use my own ICD2 programmer/debugger through MPLab, using their own on-board RJ6 Ext PGM socket, I get an error. Also, I don't get their port mapping. I'm using an PIC12F683 which has GPIO. The EasyPic6 only has ports A-E and all sorts of LED's go off for no apparent reason.
THis is really frustrating!
Did I make a mistake purchasing this board?
Should I send it back and cash out?
Am I going to need a development board down the line? (What are some of the considerations to owning one, pro's/con's like?)
I'm looking to learn more, and develop all sorts of projects using LCDs, IC2, etc. I just need a little bit of direction in my learning.
Thanks for any help people!