Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Beginner's PIC Questions

Status
Not open for further replies.

joe_1

Member
I am new to PIC, and have following questions:
1- I want to buy PIC programmer and wonder if they all work regardless of the compiler type being used. I do not want to buy one programmer for Basic code and another for C code.
2- I got some *.wav files. I got hand held device which has some push buttons. Depending on which button is pushed, corresponding sound file will play. Is this project PIC can handle?. Based on my reading I don't think there is any PIC type, that can be programmed to play sound, but PIC can toggle some address lines to select which one to play. If I am right, does anyone know what kind of chip I need, and how to transfer my wave file from my computer to that chip?

Thanks very much for all responds.
 
joe_1 said:
I am new to PIC, and have following questions:
1- I want to buy PIC programmer and wonder if they all work regardless of the compiler type being used. I do not want to buy one programmer for Basic code and another for C code.

The compiler makes no difference, all should produce a machine code HEX file, which any programmer should be able to handle. For a suitable programmer (and free software) check my website at http://www.winpicprog.co.uk. You may also find my tutorials helpful, it's essential to understand PIC assembler to effectively use either C or BASIC.

2- I got some *.wav files. I got hand held device which has some push buttons. Depending on which button is pushed, corresponding sound file will play. Is this project PIC can handle?. Based on my reading I don't think there is any PIC type, that can be programmed to play sound, but PIC can toggle some address lines to select which one to play. If I am right, does anyone know what kind of chip I need, and how to transfer my wave file from my computer to that chip?

A PIC (at least the low and mid-range ones) can't handle external memory, which makes life rather difficult for doing that. Their limited internal memory makes any large scale data minipulation rather difficult.
 
The pic can be used as the controller for such a device, but for the actual storage/playback you will need extra circuitry...

If you only want short sounds (60 - 90 seconds total). Then you could use an ISD (winbond) Soundchip (google for ISD2590 for example).

If you want longer sounds then it gets more complicated as you will need to find storage for that amount of data...
One way i can think of is to use a 16F877 to read/write the sound to a compactflash card and send it to an DA for playback.
This way you could store hundred's of megs.

keep in mind that the pic would only be able to fetch data fast enough for slow bitrates, dont try to play stereo @ 44Ksamples /sec
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top