Really ancient history

A long, long time ago, roughly around the time of the invention of the wheel, I did a series of lessons on 8-bit PICs. These lessons were very well received, downloaded thousands of times, and although aimed at hobbyists, many professionals also used them as an introduction to microcontrollers.

Craig Johnson made an experimenter's board to help with these lessons, which was originally kitted by the American QRP Club and later by Kanga U.S. Over the years this board underwent a couple of revisions, and is still available from Craig directly.

I have continued to get questions about these lessons, even though it is over a decade, and the target micro, the PIC16F84A, pretty long in the tooth.   Most of the more recent questions have to do with the development environment, which has changed pretty dramatically since MPLAB 6.

I finally broke down and decided to update a couple of the lessons, those that go into great detail about manipulating MPLAB.

Of course, I based them on MPLAB-X, rather than MPLAB 8.  MPLAB-X was pretty rough during the beta testing, but has evolved into quite a nice IDE. Reviewing these old MPLAB documents reminded me of just how much the environment has improved. I also updated the screenshots and some of the prose for Windows 10.  I don't use Windows much myself, but these days most people do, so it seemed to make sense.

The lessons are both available on gitlab in pdf; Lesson 3 which does some initial exploration of MPLAB-X which is available here, and Lesson 4 which explores the MPLAB-X simulator in some detail here.

 The only other lesson that is tempting is Lesson 11.  It goes into a lot of detail about manipulating a program called FPP, which is no longer available. The replacement, tho, hardly seems worth it.  On MPLAB-X with the PIC-EL III it reduces to "click this button".

So perhaps that will reduce the emails in the future.  In any event, it should make things easier for those who are finally getting around to doing Elmer 160.