Hi Wade, You can actually power a PICmicro in exactly the same way - leave the Vdd pin open on a PIC16F84 and drive a current through one or two I/O pins set to "input". You'll find that the oscillator will start up and the chip will run quite well (although logic output levels will be lower than the input pin voltages). myke ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wade Carpenter" To: Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 3:29 PM Subject: [OT]: Magic CMOS chips Hi Everyone, Just thought I'd share a funny experience from the lab. We needed a 15-bit counter from parts that we have available to us in the lab, so we took two CD4024 7-bit counters and a dual JK Flip flop to do the job. Well, we laid them all out on a breadboard, conencted all the power to the right places, fired it up and saw that the output from the last of the CD4024's was pretty bad. It was counting correctly and everything like that, but only after we put some fairly large capacitance across power. Anyway, after a bit of playing around we realized that this was one of those breadboards with the split power rails, so we weren't actually powering the chip up! Needless to say, once we gave it power, the output seems to be a lot nicer. The strange part is that the thing was still counting properly, power or not! If only every chip ran like that! -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads