By now, several folks have suggested updating your curriculum to newer
products from Microchip.  Not a bad suggestion, either, unless you have a
wealth of equipment and materials oriented around the '84 chip.  The '628
can be a drop in replacement with many advantages.

To answer your question though, as to the best approach to teaching non-EE
students about PIC chips goes... *my* thoughts are to avoid too much of the
internals until they are ready for it. Instead, show how PIC chips are
problem solvers - what can PIC chips do for you?  Then show a little on how
they solve problems by typically repsonding to inputs from their
environment and generating outputs back to the environment.

Then get their hands dirty with LED blinkers that at first have no inputs,
just code that blinks the LED.  Then put some sort of input into the pot:
maybe a potentiometer that they can turn and make the rate of flashing vary
from slow to fast.  At this point, they should be getting the connection of
the PIC making decisions of how to control the world around them.

One more step before DC/stepper motors are connected.  Motors if not done
right will fry things. This is a good teaching method too but not the best.
 Before the motors are connected, connect LEDs again to show motor
direction and with suitable hookup, motor power (think brightness).  For
stepper motor setups, use as many LEDs as are required to show all phases,
forward and reverse.

The students can play with the LEDs until they understand what's going on
and then hook up some motors for real fun.

Teach as much about the internals as needed in each step to get them going
with actual experiments rather than trying to make them absorb all PIC
knowledge before moving on to real tests with electricity.

Hope this helps!

Tom M.

Tom Page <T.Page@LBORO.AC.UK> wrote: how to teach pics

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