anyone willing to help with datasheet tutorial?

[ghostman11]

hi guys.
ive been spending alot of time of late trying to get to grips with pic datasheets.
as a noob (ok i been a noob a long time!) one of the hardest things ive found is to get to grips with the pic datasheets. from a beginners perspective they seem total incomprehensiable! and yet at every turn your faced with people saying LOOK IN THE DATASHEET! wich ok i agree is correct info, but for many the datasheet is just a jumbled collection of random acronyms etc and meaningless tables.
for nearly 2 years ive tried and tried to get info out of them!! finaly progress is being made and i am starting to learn how to read the sheets, actualy once you get the hang of it you wonder why it took so long to understand!
anyway the point of the post is. while its still fresh in my mind i would like to do a short beginers guide in how to read the datasheet using the things ive found to be helpful, however i am stil;l very new at this so in order to make it accurate i wondered if any of you old hands would like to give a hand and just check what i am writeing is correct!!
some of the bigest hurdles i faced were silly things like not fully understanding the conection with reg names etc, so the idea is to take small sections of the datasheet and explain what they refer to and how the information is used. personaly i think it may help others in the future
let me know what you think
cheers

 

[Wp100]

Hi,

While I follow and understand your sentiments entirely, you have to ask why all these many Micro Forums with their help Stickys and all the online Micro turorials are around.

 

[ghostman11]

Hi,

While I follow and understand your sentiments entirely, you have to ask why all these many Micro Forums with their help Stickys and all the online Micro turorials are around.

i do agree with you, however my own experiance of finaly getting some kind of basic understanding of datasheets would have been quicker if the information had presented in a different manner. that isnt to say there is anything wrong with the way its presented, i guess everyone has a different way of learning and not everything works for everyone, so my idea was to do a tutorial solely based on what i found useful and what explanations i found that finaly made it 'CLICK' for me.
maybe i just need things put a different way maybe i have learning problems ive no idea but surely it cant hurt to present the same information in a slightly different manner for others that maybe found it hard to learn the normal way like i myself do. dont get me wrong if its considered a waste of time them i wont bother, from my own perspective i see it as a chance to perhaps give a small something back for all the help ive had over the last two years, many members here and a few in particular have given me a great deal of there time and effort i would like to do something that in a small way says how much that has been appreciated.
cheers jason

 

[JimB]

at every turn your faced with people saying LOOK IN THE DATASHEET!

Yes, when I was a little lad and asked "how do you spell ?????", the reply was often "look it up in the dictionary".
Not a very heplful answer when you are struggling with a word like "pneumatic" for example.

but for many the datasheet is just a jumbled collection of random acronyms etc and meaningless tables.

An unfortunate side effect of not knowing the basics.

actualy once you get the hang of it you wonder why it took so long to understand!

That is what is known as experience.

so the idea is to take small sections of the datasheet and explain what they refer to and how the information is used. personaly i think it may help others in the future
let me know what you think

Give it a try and see what happens, it is not something which I would like to do just for the fun of it.
However, as you have had the struggle to understand PIC datasheets and have finally succeeded, you are in an ideal position to write such a beginners guide.

JimB

 

[ghostman11]

thanks jim thats kind of made my mind upto do it

 

[lurkepus]

what about making a datasheet with information on how to read one .. like just explaining the basic stuff you need to be able to read the datasheets for PIC mcu's .. i have been reading alot of em and they seem to have asimmliar pattern no mather what type of mcu you are reading about.. ofcause a dsPIC has more pages than a datasheet for a PIC10 familiy but the datasheets are still made the same way ..

 

[jpanhalt]

Doesn't Microchip already have a tutorial: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2012/02/33023a.pdf ? It may be a little lengthy, but if you are going to cover everything, it will need to be. That plus the datasheet, MPLab, and MPASM make for a lot of paper.

One thing I wish were available are printed copies of datasheets. I have an older copy of the 12C5xx datasheet in a bound, soft-cover edition. I find it so much easier to read than printouts from my PC.

More to the point, and as another newbie, I think the flaw in trying to write a tutorial on datasheets is in defining the intent of the user sufficiently well to limit the complexity needed. Some people will be only interested in the switching functions, like I was for the 12F509 for several years. Others will want to get into analog functions or will want to use a chip with lots of analog functions only for digital, and so forth.

@JimB

Yes, when I was a little lad and asked "how do you spell ?????", the reply was often "look it up in the dictionary".
Not a very heplful answer when you are struggling with a word like "pneumatic" for example.

I thought I was the only one who complained that you needed a dictionary for misspelled words, not correctly spelled ones. Spelling was my worst subject by far. There are words I never learned how to spell, like "subtract." Left to my own, I usually put an extra "s" in it to rhyme with "abstract. I even screw up spelling for assembly instructions by reversing letters.

John

 

[lurkepus]

I might have goten it all wrong but i was thinking more of a dicionary witch explained the various abbreviations used in the datasheets and since i'm new to mcu's i have spendt alot of time trying to figure out what they all mean ...

 

[JimB]

Jpanhalt

Spelling was my worst subject by far.

I was quite good a spelling at school, but there was one occasion where seeing a incorrectly spelt word has confused me for life!

The word MODEL I always did know how to spell MODEL correctly, until one day I glanced at something which somebody had written and spelt the word as MODLE.
I thought at the time," ha, you cant spell MODEL".

But since then, whenever I have to write the word MODEL, Captain Paranoia is sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear "are you sure? eh, are you sure it is MODEL and not MODLE?"

Maybe I need a tutorial on how to spell MODEL!

JimB

 

[jpanhalt]

@lurkepus

Have you tried searching on "document conventions," "glossary," and/or "mnemonics" ? The datasheets and the general reference I gave have sections on each.

John

 

[lurkepus]

John i have been reading so many datasheets lately that it is all a big blure but ofcause i will read the General reference closer .. problem ist that ther are so many datasheets so it is really hard to keep track of em all .. Anyway if it's in there i will be ok and there are noe reason to write it all over again ...

 

[ghostman11]

Doesn't Microchip already have a tutorial: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2012/02/33023a.pdf ? It may be a little lengthy, but if you are going to cover everything, it will need to be. That plus the datasheet, MPLab, and MPASM make for a lot of paper.

One thing I wish were available are printed copies of datasheets. I have an older copy of the 12C5xx datasheet in a bound, soft-cover edition. I find it so much easier to read than printouts from my PC.

More to the point, and as another newbie, I think the flaw in trying to write a tutorial on datasheets is in defining the intent of the user sufficiently well to limit the complexity needed. Some people will be only interested in the switching functions, like I was for the 12F509 for several years. Others will want to get into analog functions or will want to use a chip with lots of analog functions only for digital, and so forth.

@JimB


I thought I was the only one who complained that you needed a dictionary for misspelled words, not correctly spelled ones. Spelling was my worst subject by far. There are words I never learned how to spell, like "subtract." Left to my own, I usually put an extra "s" in it to rhyme with "abstract. I even screw up spelling for assembly instructions by reversing letters.

John

actualy this shows exactly what i mean. yes the reference you link too is very helpful to me NOW, but i am thinking of before this for example using a page from the link you gave
View attachment 61073
once i knew that the letters in the boxs were actualy 'bit names' and how they related to the register/how you could use the name in the box (i am talking c code BTW) to set the bit and reg as was needed the sheet started to make more sense. i found just very simple info like that was the key for me. some of us myself in particular havnt been in a learning enviroment for many many years, we come from completely non technical backgrounds and in my case from an era when a calculator realy was seen as a high tech high cost bit of kit!!! so many things that others take for granted are actualy not understood by some newbies, so i guess my idea is to explain in a way i found helpful what the box's mean and how the info relates.
once thats graspsed i found the datasheet far far easier to understand. again it took me ages to fully understand simple things like what the hell is fosc???? how does it relate??? i dont intend to go through all the datasheet and do a idiots guide to using a pic its more about understanding how to read the data sheet and get the information you want. another example the diagrams of the pin layouts i had no idea what the arrows were, but proved to be helpful once i discovered you could use it to tell at a glance if a pin was say just a open drain or a input/output pin. seems very simple but for some like me with zero prior knowledge of the subject and no life experiance i could relate it too, it means nothing.
the little solid line under something that say signifies the pin (like MCLR) is active low. the info is useful but first you have to know what the line means.
anyway i hope that kind of explains what i want to do better

 

[lurkepus]

ghostman .. i guess we were on the same page i just didn't explain it as good as you just did