The embedded Systems Conference was held last week in San Jose, and
Microchip was present in a big way.  They have a (large!) new show booth,
which showcased a large number of third party products built using PIC
microcontrollers.  There were new paper data books and a new CD.  Upstairs
(!) for their big giveaway, they were running hourly classes featuring their
ICD development environment and hitech C (? one of the C compilers, anyway.)
In an hour, you got to try out the mplab/ICD environment, fix the C program,
download the code into a "4 channel digital voltmeter" utilizing the
PIC16F873, use the debug enviroment to fix the run-time error, disconnect it
and take it home.  I thought it was an excellant compromise between
"cool giveaway", educational seminar, and "showing off."  Much better than
listening to an actor deliver a canned talk for a tote bag!  I hope
microchip continues in this way, and I hope other vendors copy them.

An hour was just barely enough time for this, especially if you'd never used
the environment or a laptop with ff-joystick, but they had appropriate
assistance available and things seemed to go pretty well.  Don't forget to
take the chip/system out of debug mode before disconnecting it - the bugs
were easy to find, but I spent the next 20 minutes carefully following "the
rest of the instructions" looking for a hidden step that I'd missed when
my meter stopped working after being disconnected :-)

BillW

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