Programming a microcontroller.

A microcontroller is a small computer which fits on a single chip. Like other computers, the microcontroller follows a sequence of instructions, one at a time, to carry out a program. However, because the microcontroller is so physically small, usually we carry out most of the development of the program on a PC, and only copy the program onto the chip when we hope (often wrongly) that we have found all the problems. Here is a picture of three different microcontrollers, all manufactured by Microchip They are PIC 12F683, with 8 pins, PIC 18F4455, with 40 pins, and PIC 18F2550, with 28 pins:

This shape of electronic component is called a DIP, which stands for Dual In-Line Package, and many other complicated electronic components besides microcontrollers are manufactured in the same general shape, including stereo amplifiers and digital clocks. Breadboards are designed so that the DIP can straddle the center channel so that each pin on the DIP is in another group of holes. This DIP is not connected to anything else on the breadboard:

The pins on the chip are numbered, starting with the upper left-hand corner and continuing counter clockwise around the chip. You can read off the numbers and names of the pins on the PIC12F683 in the circuit diagram below.

In this session, we connect up a PIC 12F683 microcontroller in a circuit, copy a small program into it, and run it. Here is the circuit diagram for programming the microcontroller:

This circuit uses two more parts, not used in the LED session. One is the PIC 12F683, and the other is a programming header. Not shown in the schematic is the voltage regulator and battery clip/battery. There is an additional resistor, with a value of 10KΩ ; it is labeled R1 in the schematic. It has brown, black, orange, and gold bands on it, standing for 1, 0, three zeros, and 5%, respectively. This is quite a bit more resistance than the R2 resistor, which is 470 Ω, so don't mix them up. C1 should be .1μFarad.

The schematic looks quite complicated, but there are only two new parts and five new wires from the LED circuit. The LED and 470Ω resistor are turned around, though. In this circuit the positive side of the LED connects to the PIC12F683 and the negative side of the LED connects to the resistor. The resistor connects to ground, instead of the positive bus. Here is a photo of a completed version:

You can see the wires to the battery clip in the picture, but the battery happens to be unplugged.

Setting up the software

Before we can actually use this circuit, we need to set up the program on the microcontroller, and before we can do that, we need to install the appropriate software in the PC. The computers in the lab all have MPLAB software installed; if you're doing part of the lab on your own laptop, you'll need to download it.

Writing and compiling your program

Today we are writing programs in assembly language. I'm giving you a program to start with, and you will modify it. Start up the MPLAB software [START/All Programs/Microchip/MPLAB IDE 8.36/MPLAB IDE]

Use the [Configure/Set Device] feature to specify the PIC 12F683
Use the File pulldown to choose the file to be compiled.
Use Project/QuickBuild to compile the file.
If necessary, fix errors and reattempt compilation.

At this point, you should see in the output window, among other messages:

Build Successful

Transferring the program to the chip

Plug a PICKit 2 programmer into the USB port, carefully place the PICKit 2 over the 6-pin header on your circuit, as shown below

and click Connect on the Programmer menu in MPLAB.

If you get no errors, click Program on the Programmer menu.

If there are no problems, carefully remove the PICKit 2 from the header, connect your battery to the circuit, and see how it runs. It is supposed to flash F S C in Morse code, over and over. It does so rather slowly, for the benefit of those who don't really know Morse code.

The Morse Code program

Morse code is explained in the following comment, which appears in the code:

Comments in PIC Assembly Language (which is the language in which this program is written) start with a semi-colon character, and continue to the end of the line. Comments are intended for the next person who works on the code, and do not actually give any instructions to the microcontroller. So this table of Morse code letter values doesn't tell the computer anything. The instructions to the computer appear further down.

When the microcontroller starts up, it begins going through the instructions beginning at location zero. In this program, the instructions beginning at line 45 will be placed at location zero, because of the org 0 on line 44. (In notepad, you can find numbered lines by pulling down the Edit menu and clicking Goto Line. Notepad disables Goto Line if wordwrap is enabled; if Goto Line doesn't seem to work (is grayed out) pull down the Format menu, and unclick wordwrap.)

The bit about TRISIO is initialization to set up the microcontroller. To understand it completely, you'd need to read through the datasheet for the PIC12F683.

The program goes through the instruction on each line, then moves to the next line, unless the instruction is a goto, call, return, or retfie

It is logical to conclude that the line call letterF causes the microcontroller to flash an F in Morse code. It is also true, but the reason is is true is that a block of code named letterF() has already been defined in this program. That block looks like this:

Since the table of letters tells us that the letter F is ..-. it is again logical to believe that that is what this code does -- tells the microcontroller to first flash a dot, then a dot, then a dash, etc. Again, it is also true, but again, because we have appropriate code elsewhere in the program. For example, we have:

The colon suggests that this is the definition of dot; that's correct, and only one definition is allowed for a symbol in a program. We can use it as often as we want, though.

To make sense of this we need to know that GPIO bit 2 is connected to pin 5, which is where we connected the LED. When GPIO bit 2 is set to 1, pin 5 has 5 volts on it. When we send the value 0 to GPIO pin 2, the voltage on the pin changes to 0 volts. The names of the pins on the circuit schematic hint at this.

So a dot is flashed by turning the LED on, waiting awhile, then turning it off and waiting awhile. We need a wait after the dot to keep the flashes from running unreadably together, and that is what the dotTime code does.

The names of the various PIC12F683 pins and registers are hidden inside a file which we include at the top of the program in the line

The dotTime block looks like this

delay is yet another block of code, probably the most complicated in this program:

Writing your own program

Read through the existing program in morseCode.c, and modify it to flash your own initials in morseCode. Unless your initials happen to be something like CFS you will probably want both change main and write several new blocks of code.