What was your first electronics project?

That's a great question. I'm sure a bunch of my first experiments where just hooking things to a battery and a switch, or putting together circuits from a "learning kit" onto a breadboard, so I won't be counting those.

I think my first, actual, real project was building a PIC programmer. It's one of the first PCBs I remember etching, and the first time I remember following all of the steps to a project, from researching several alternatives, selecting the best fit for my needs, gathering the materials, instructions and tools, all the way to completing an actual assembled gizmo that had a purpose.

It was an "Enhanced" NOPPP3 programmer, and I built it after someone recommended me to look into Microchip PICs (they knew I was passionate about programming and electronics, so they introduced me to microcontrollers and in the process casually changed my life).

That's a great question. I'm sure a bunch of my first experiments where just hooking things to a battery and a switch, or putting together circuits from a "learning kit" onto a breadboard, so I won't be counting those.

I think my first, actual, real project was building a PIC programmer. It's one of the first PCBs I remember etching, and the first time I remember following all of the steps to a project, from researching several alternatives, selecting the best fit for my needs, gathering the materials, instructions and tools, all the way to completing an actual assembled gizmo that had a purpose.

It was an "Enhanced" NOPPP3 programmer, and I built it after someone recommended me to look into Microchip PICs (they knew I was passionate about programming and electronics, so they introduced me to microcontrollers and in the process casually changed my life).

One of my favourite projects used a PIC chip, the one with four A-to-D converters on it plus a useful number of digital I/O's. I wrote the program in Assembler, which was so simple it seemed hardly worth using a higher-level language. The circuit contained the PIC chip, a ceramic resonator, a capacitor or two, and some pins to solder the wires to. The Veroboard fitted into about the smallest aluminium box available, with a 9-way D connector on each end, one male and one female. The purpose of this little box was to convert the analogue voltages from a two-axis analogue joystick into the variable-frequency quadrature square-wave signals required by the mouse port on the BBC Microcomputer. This meant I could use a proper joystick to fly aeroplanes on the Beeb! The little box is powered from the Beeb, so no external power supply is needed. I was never happy flying with a keyboard...

The great thing about doing it with a PIC was that the box replaced several up/down counters, two full-sized A-to-D converters, a clock circuit, digital interfaces (opto-isolated?), a few other bits and pieces, and yet another PSU. Three push-buttons replicate the three buttons on the BBC mouse. Using individual chips and discrete components to do the job, plus the power supply, would have required a container about the size of an AVO Model 7 multimeter (est) but much lighter.

I would have liked to have used the PIC range for work projects but I don't think MicroChip made them to military specifications at that time.

I love when PICs (or any other microcontroller) can replace a bunch of other ICs. Before I used PICs I was using logic gates and converters, and counters. It was mind-blowing to me that all of that could be replaced with a single IC that I could program to my liking.

I definitely like the simplicity of PIC assembly (at least for the earlier family of devices. The new ones are fairly more complex) and I also enjoy writing code directly in assembly instead of going for a higher level language.

battlecoder said:

I love when PICs (or any other microcontroller) can replace a bunch of other ICs.

Yes. There is an ever-returning cost though: you usually have an additional manufacturing step to program the device.

Yeah. Mind-blowing to me too. After the A-to-D-to-Quadrature I made a digital selector switch using two CMOS logic chips so that I could select either the digitsed joystick output or a genuine mouse output at the flick of a two-pole changeover toggle switch. This saved lots of plugging and unplugging, which is always a good idea where mini-DIN connectors are being used. One pole of the switch was connected to the Chip Enable pins, the other to the Vcc pins. I did that to prevent overloading of the 5v supply from the BBC mouse port; it probably wasn't necessary.

Ah, but....  Is it really an extra step? Whatever the program is and wherever it might be stored when you'd written it (e.g. as a disk file, or to a ROM chip that you could copy numerous times) you still have to write it to the PIC chip somehow for it to work. I bought a genuine MicroChip programmer to which I fiitted a Zero-Insertion-Force socket before plugging EPROM's or EEPROM's into it.

True, but there are options to streamline the programming procedure. There are devices that can store a program (and settings) in memory and do "one button" programming. You just put the IC on the socket and press the button. Even Microchip provides a PC software that does something similar (given something like a Pickit 3 and a PC terminal). And there has to be better "assembly-line-ready" options.

But It's totally an additional step in the process, and can be a challenge, so it's a fair observation and a good point that you raise. Depending on how much logic are you replacing with the PIC and how much design, manufacturing and repair cost you are saving it might be either totally worth doing, or 100% not at all.