PIC starter kit

[gjpollitt]

Which is the best kit or chip to learn with

thanks
Graham

 

[Joel Rainville]

(You should have posted that in the Microcontrollers section.)

I think any mid-range PIC is great to start with.

A lot of people and tutorials recommend the 16F628(A) as a good starting point. You'll see the 16F84 being used in quite a lot of tutorials around. It is more and more difficult to find since it has been phased out for a while now by Microchip. It's the 16F628's ancestor, and basically anything it could do, the 628 can.

There are basically two ways to get started :

- The easy and expensive way : buy a ready-made, off-the-shelf programmer and development board

- The hard but most rewarding way : build a programmer and setup a basic dev environment all by yourself, with our help of course

Check out http://www.piclist.com, especially their "Beginner's Checklist". It has all the info to get you started. If you have a doubt about your choices at first, come back here and search past threads for answers. If nothing comes up with the search, ask questions (in the right forum )

Good luck!

 

[samcheetah]

go to Nigel Goodwin's site http://www.winpicprog.co.uk

there you will find a great series of tutorials based on the 16F628 microcontroller. i would recommend you the P16PRO40 programmer because it is cheaper than the PICkit and it programs more microcontrollers than the PICkit. if you really want to invest in a programmer made by microchip, you should buy the ICD2.