Sick… Design Lab update (9/8/06)
Fell sick yesterday. Actually, it was on Tuesday night that I felt unwell. Caught a cold i think. Lucky I had Mei Yen around to help me cook porridge and get medicine for me.
Design lab is going on well, I think. Not much progress, but we’ve learnt how to program the microcontroller. All that’s left is to wire up the sensor to the ADC, and the BCD to the display. After that we can wire it up to the microcontroller. I suggested that we program the PIC in conjunction with the wiring up so we would know how the data will move. A lot of minor things that we have to take into consideration since they all add up to one big problem later if we don’t.
Luckily for me, my laptop has a serial port. The microprocessor programmer needs to interface with the comp through a serial port, and I was worried that I can’t work from home. At least now I know I can bring my laptop over to the labs, program stuff, and bring it back home to tweak around with when the lab closes. The programming of the microcontroller can be done using a Jaycar programming kit and a computer with MPLAB. MPLAB is a free software, downloadable from http://www.microchip.com/ . Just look up MPLAB IDE and it should direct you to a list of possible links. It should be the first link. They also provide you with guides on how to use MPLAB. The programming is very low level though, something along the lines of VHDL, so be prepared to change your mindset if you’re a high level language programmer. :)
