Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: sevenlayermuddle on May 23, 2020, 12:56:43 AM
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Driven by a motivation to keep busy whilst surviving adverse events in the news, I seem to be getting back into Microchip PIC, after a long absence of interest.
First impressions... wow, these chips can do more than ever. :)
Second impressions... Eek, the IDE and sample projects, what a mess. What used to be a few hundred lines of assembler in a single source file is now in C, and split between dozens of source files. Many of the C files are machine-generated by an obscure GUI configurator, completely impenetrable. :'(
But I am getting there, managed to make an LED flash this afternoon. All that remains is to think of what on earth I will now do with a PIC, once I have mastered the technology again. ::)
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Cool! What chips are you using?
I’ve built a few things with ESP32 boards. Integrated WiFi, Bluetooth and BLE all on a tiny board.
My favourite board at the mo is the ESP32-PICO-V4. Currently building a thing to interface Bluetooth game controllers with retro game consoles (specifically, an Atari Jaguar).
I’m relatively new to this. Got a Uni-level C/C++ education, but never used it professionally. Started out with the Arduino IDE before switching to Espressif’s IDF framework. I finally settled on Visual Studio Code with PlatformIO on top of the ESP-IDF.
Recently bought a JTAG debugger board so I can finally work with breakpoints, watches and step-through.
They really are quite amazing little devices!
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I have an interest in the chips with on-board op amps, so I bought a ‘curiosity’ development board, along with some 16F chips with op amps.
And that is about as far as I have got so far. To explore the op amps, I think I need to replace some zero ohm links with header pins and jumpers, which I don’t yet have. But I have certainly succeeded in installing sample code on a virgin device and running it. :)