Hi,

I am working on a project around an 877A PIC.
Having started using assembler on the coding of it, I remembered how
laborious a task
it was. So I bought firstly the C compiler from PICant's website, but I
outgrew that fairly quickly (although I must say it's pretty good for the
price).
I am now using the PICC C Compiler and find this an excellent tool.

As I am trying to shoehorn the project into an 877A, would you guys out
there recommend using a second PIC (F84A or something - i'm using this as
it's in my parts box) as a slave to the "master" 877A.

I have an LCD display on the slave communicating via serial to the master
PIC.
I found that this saves me ports on the master and a whole heap of code, LCD
routines etc.
On startup, the slave writes a string to the first line of the LCD. The
message is pulled from the first 16 bytes of the internal EEprom (or up to
the first 0x00 found)

I have created a pseudo command language like this
Mxxyy   <-- Move to row xx, column yy
Dzzzzzzzzz (up to 20 chars) <-- display the message zzzz... onto the current
LCD location
X        <-- Clear display
Wxxyy    <-- Write yy to location xx in the internal eeprom
Rxx      <-- return value in location of xx to the serial port as hex chars
Z150163  <-- reset the eeprom byte 0 to 0xff (seeminly random sequence-a
magic date (my           birthday)).

Ok the question, does this make sense, or would you guys suggest something
else? have I lost the plot?

I have already coded and tested the slave PIC but I thought, before i go too
far down this route, is there a better way?

(incidentally I *have* been called an idiot before, sometimes it was
offensive, sometimes not, sometimes deservedly, depends upon their mood, and
mine).

Regards
Jim

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