Hi John:
 Are you talkin about  the $60.00 EPIC Plus PIC programmer  sold by
MicroEngineering? Labs,Inc.

  EDU
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At 03:16 PM 9/18/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi Patrick,
>
>As one beginner to another let me say I started with even less experience
>than you a couple of weeks ago and boy am I surprised at what can be done.
>I had almost exactly the same challenge of hooking up 4 x 7 segment LEDs to
>a PIC and the same question: Not enough i/o's? Using the circuit in Myke's
>book on page 264 doesn't help because even if you could do it - it would
>use all the PIC 16F84 i/o lines without leaving any for push buttons.
>
>The Answer: Well, I toyed with using a 40 pin PIC which I bought but never
>started with. Instead, I dug out a device I bought and almost forgot about
>- it is a 4 digit LCD which has on board intelligence and only requires ONE
>i/o line from the PIC. You send it serial commands and it displays whatever
>you want. There are only three connections to the device, +5v, GRND and
>Data. It cost about $   and you can see it at http://www.elproducts.com
>
>Doing it this way leave me 12 i/o lines for LED's and pushbuttons on a 16F84.
>
>The great thing is that I also got PICBasicPro; a basic compiler that
>produces PIC ASM/HEX code and that thing is AMAZING! It makes programming
>the PIC a total piece of cake, especially the serial i/o for the display -
>its just one line of code like this: SEROUT
>1,6,[$F4,tenmins,mins,tensecs,secs] which displays a time code (4 digits)
>via pin 1, in mode 6 (N9600), and the $F4 is a configuration byte for
>things like whether or not you want leading zeros, colons etc.
>
>To me, it really makes learning PIC ASM a bit redundant unless you are
>working on something really critical. The book I found most useful was
>"Easy PIC'n" and I use the EPIC plus programmer ($39) hooked up to PC
>parallel port.
>
>Hope this helps.
>John
>
>
>