Assembly for PICmicro MCUs course

[Bonanza]

Hello,

I purchased the assembly version of your PIC microcontroller course and I am very excited about it. I went through the "Introduction" and understood it all with no problem.

1. When I got to "Getting Started" I did okay up to the section "Using E-blocks with the tutorials" which I found confusing. Is that section simply informational for when we start to write programs in reference to the specific chip we are using, or are we supposed to do something with the information when we first try to test the version three development board?

2. Next issue in the very next section: "Using the IDE" I could not open the IDE by "click on the button above" (the grey Full listing/IDE button) as suggested. and since I couldn't do that, tutorial 3 is not automatically loaded for the board test.

3. When I open the IDE from my Start, programs menu, I looked for the tutorial TUTA03.ASM which is the name of the file referenced in the "Operational check". Although there is obviously some tutorial 3 files, none are named TUTA03.ASM. Therefore, I am unable to perform the operational check as suggested...

I jumped on your web page and looked for some test files for the version 3 development board - all I could find was a couple of files already in hex...I don't know what chip they are targeted to and so I didn't even try to load it.

Could you please help me resolve these issues?

Thanks for your help...

[Benj]

Hello Bonanza

Ok hopefully we can get you up and running with the course fairly quickly.

1) Yes this is just information regarding E-Blocks and our programming hardware. This is just for reference so you shouldn't worry too much about this.

2) If you click on Tutorials 1-14 -> Tutorial 3 -> Tutorial 3.1 and then click on the Full Listing IDE button then hopefully the program will load up into the ASM:IDE tool.

3) If the IDE loaded correctly then you should be able to compile and program (using the Assemble and Program buttons) your hardware to perform the test.

Test files available online are likely to be for the 16F88. Programming hex files for different targets will not damage the hardware so you do not have to worry about this. If its the wrong target then you may get an error message or the code may just run.

Let me know how you get on.

[Bonanza]

Thanks for the help Ben, and for getting back about it so quickly. I actually tried that last night. The program builds fine, but then I initially get an error saying PIC micro has not been erased. If I continue anyway, it fails saying "programming failed: programming memory check failed."

[Bonanza]

Well Ben, I figured out why I got that error message - do I feel silly

I opened the ASM IDE and went into the config to look around. It had a PIC autodetect so I clicked on it and it came up with a different chip number then what I had placed in the socket of the development board. (The development kit I purchased came with a separate PIC16F877A which I had installed). I didn't realize the development board already had a PIC16F88 already onboard

I took out the 16F88 and the program loads fine now into the 16F877A - I'm well on my way into tutorial one.

Thanks for the help!

[Benj]

Hey thats great, Glad your all up and running now.

Thanks for letting us know.