Hello,

I'm just starting to get into PIC programming and have been able to do a few
simple projects.  I'm currently trying to use a serial port of a pc to
communicate with the PIC.  I'm using a 16F84A with a 4Mhz crystal.

What I'm looking for is an example of how to send data to the pic from the
pc from within QBasic or preferably Visual Basic.  I'm not very fluent with
either language so its hard for me to break down complicated programs.  What
I'm trying to do is to light an LED based on a selection from the computer.
For example, I would have a menu in Visual Basic that would have four
buttons and when one was pressed would cause a LED to light for a few
seconds.  I understand that what I will probably need to do is send a byte
of data to the PIC and compare to some preselected values assigned to the
LED's and when a certain value is recieved turn on that LED.  I just don't
know how to send a byte to the pic and have it save it into a register.

I've found a few examples on the internet for rs232 communications from the
pic to the pc and was able to get the message "Hello World" to print from a
QBasic program.  I haven't been able to find a example of how to send data
to a PIC.

One other thing I was interested in is when sending data to a pc does it
always save the value in ASCII.  What I mean is, what I mean is I have
purchased a 24LC64 eprom and wanted to read a value from memory from within
the pc and have it save to a file but I want the hex saved.  When I printed
the Hello World message the PIC sends the values in hex and QBasic printed
its ASCII value.  How would I get it to print the actual hex value?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Jamey Schroeder

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