Jan-Erik

Last year I taught a microcontroller course to a small class of
high school students.  Our environment combined the board found
in the link below, with breadboards and a handful of LEDs,
switches, and LCD displays.

http://www.futurlec.com/PICDevBoard.html

This board is not ideal as I had to make cables with DIP clips
to attach to the breadboards. But it is flexible;  the
programmer is built in; and it's very inexpensive.

As for using the 16F series processor, I think that choosing it
over the 18F series was a big help rather than an obstacle.  The
purpose of the course was not just to learn about PICs but to
understand how all computer chips do what they do.  That's why I
used Assembly language rather than C or PICBasic.

The limitations of the 16F series helped to show how the chip
works.  For example, when students asked "Why can't I copy from
register X to register Y", they could lookup the 14 bit opcode
and see that there is no room in the 14-bit program memory to
store the instruction, a source register, and a destination.
Similar discoveries about banking and paging also proved to be
be great learning opportunities for the students.

For next year's course, I will keep looking for a better
environment (the Dwarf boards are very interesting).  But if
necessary, (e.g. to keep the cost down) I might return to these
or similar units.


Andrew
akieran_at_ureach_dot_com

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