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Overview

The MultiPIC Development Board is a development platform for the 16F and 18F series PIC microcontrollers. The board provides the following:

  • A stable power supply to the microcontroller
  • Protection against incorrect power supply voltages and accidental
    reverse polarity
  • The crystal circuit for the PIC’s oscillator
  • An IC socket holder for a 8-, 18-, 28- or 40-pin PIC
    microcontroller (16F or 18F series)
  • A Reset circuit and button
  • An In-Circuit Serial Programming connection to program and debug the PIC from MPLAB
  • Connectors to each of the PORT pins

Normally a person would design the above crucial components onto a PCB for each PIC based project. The circuit would also then include all relevant interfacing circuits, power supplies, sensors, actuators etc.

With the MultiPIC Development Board the crucial circuits part have already been designed for you and placed on a PCB to provide a stable platform from which you can start developing your control software. The PORT connectors allow you to add your external interfacing circuits to the PIC (as demonstrated in the picture below) and these you could do on separate PCBs or VERO Board.

 

 

The control software is developed in Microchip’s MPLAB IDE Integrated Development Environment) using an ASEMBLER or C-Compiler (the C18 C-compiler is used in B102) of your choice. Once the code is written, it then gets downloaded to the PIC microcontroller using a programmer. The ICD2 and ICD3programmers use In-Circuit Programming technology and it is therefore not necessary to remove the PIC chip from the actual PCB in this case. With the ICD1 programmer the PIC chip will have to be removed from the PCB and be placed into the ICD1 programmer’s socketto be programmed. In B102 we have both ICD1 (at every 7th workstation) and ICD2 (at each workstation) programmers.