I have a working K8055 with the 'dll' files loaded and can run the 'demo software that came with the Velleman CD but that is where it stops.
I am a retired electronics tech and would like to learn how to use this board to monitor and control parameters in/on a car engine.
Velleman is a strange Euro company that produces some very strange products. Your K8055 for instance!
Seems like an extremely odd way to do PICs. Velleman sell some really horrible old fashioned programmers too. I stay well clear of their stuff.
The reason you're getting no replies here is probably that nobody (that I've ever talked to or read on forums) uses anything Velleman. The K8055 seems a bit like a fancy type product, except it's able to use Windows languages instead of a proprietary BASIC (PICAXE) or C-like language (Arduino). It's quite a strange setup.
I would appreciate some sites, and or software guides, that I can use to learn and then adapt the K8055 to my project.
Google around, but I expect you'll find very little except at the Velleman site.
I purchased two books on the PIC controller but they are too complicated and do not help me learn how to interface the PC with the board.
I now have Programing and Customizing PICmicro Controllers from Myke Predko and will work through this volume.
I suspect that book (or any PIC book) might not help you very much in getting started. It's an ok book, though way out of date, but your PIC board and software is so completely non-standard that much of the info in the book may not make a lot of sense to you, and will have to be heavily adapted to suit.
If anyone knows of a PICmicro course run by TAFE, Queensland, in the Brisbane - Ipswich area that would also help.
If you want to learn PICs, you may find that you'll have to set that hardware aside and get something much more mainstream. You can learn to program the K8055 board, but that won't teach you much about PICs. You've picked a board that just has no popular support because it's too proprietary and non-standard.
To learn PICs the "usual" way, get yourself a USB programmer/debugger like the
PICkit 2 or the
Junebug, which is a PICkit 2 clone with an 18F1320 experimenter onboard. There are **broken link removed** too. Get a breadboard(s) and some PICs and discrete components and build (or buy) some ICSP cables and connectors . Using MPLAB (and the PICkit 2 software) and one of these programmer/debuggers with a breadboard for your circuits you can program almost all PICs in assembler (MPLAB comes with an assembler), BASIC, C or whatever you like. The C won't be a Windows C like Visual C though. It will be one made for PICs and not translated through a DLL. I prefer BoostC, from
SourceBoost.
And doing it this way, books and tutorials will make sense. People will know how to and be able to help you.