Thankyou Mr.Byron. You have really motivated me. Thanks a lot for your reply, I am on my way to learn about it all.... Byron A Jeff wrote: On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 11:20:01PM -0800, Vishal Changrani wrote: > hi all, > I am a student at univeristy of houston, Clear Lake. > I am currently working on a project on PIC. This is my first time working > on a live hardware project. i joined this mailing list to helf me gain more > insight but seeing your discussion has added to my apprehensions of learning > this PIC ! Nothing to be apprehensive about. Like everything in life there is a learning curve. I find that novice students tend to be very shortsighted about the tools they need to learn to get things done, and understandably so. I find it helpful to explain early on in the learning process a couple of things: 1) The level of understanding where you are now is not where you are going to finish. You'll end up being functional at a higher level than you are now. 2) Chip features will influence how you do development when you get to that functional level. In other words you don't have to understand right now about the laundry list of features you'll be able to utilize later, like hardware USART, multiple timers, comparators, PWM, CCP, SSP, and the like. However by starting with a chip with all those features on board, when you are ready for them, they will be there for you to use. I'd like to spend a minute explaning how these features influence development. As you move from novice to functional user there will be activities that you will need to do during project development. Two examples are serial communications and analog voltage generation. Now the less featured chips can do these jobs, however there are three factors you'll have to consider: 1) That you will have to write code that implements the detail of the activity. This occupies both physical and what I call "cognitive" code space as you'll have to think through in detail the process by which the activity is done. 2) It's an active process in your program. You'll have to watch the serial line. You'll have to keep track of time. You can do other things but you'll have to come back to this activity from time to time to maintain it's proper operation. 3) As an extension of #2 above, you'll have to spend active CPU, registers, and memory to actively maintain this active process. In short it'll occupy code that you'll have to write (therefore occupying you in the process), along with the active usage/maintenance of hardware resources to get the job done. As a novice, you of course have no worries about that at the moment. But often that means that a novice will make choices without consideration of these future influences. BTW you have made a good choice. The 16F877 has all of the hardware onboard to do these activities. In addition it's done in a "Set and Forget" manner. Simply configure the target hardware (USART for serial, PWM for analog voltage generation), turn it on, and off it goes. You don't have to devote any significant code, continuing resources, or cognitive thought to the activity anymore. You development thoughts can then worry about the higher level activities of "What to send on the serial port?" or "What voltage needs to be on this pin?" instead of "How do I wiggle a I/O pin for serial?" or "How do I wiggle an I/O pin to generate the correct voltage?" > I have read thorugh the data sheet of the PIC 18F877 but didnt understand > much and now am wroking thorugh another tutorial. Here are some helpful hints: 1) You don't need to know everything right now. What you need is a high level overview of what's available, and a functional knowledge of the types of things you need right at this moment. In other words don't spend an hour reading about comparators, if you don't need comparators right now. Just get a sense of what they do (compare voltages), and that they are available if you need them. 2) The datasheet is a reference manual, not a tutorial. To get a tutorial style understanding of how things work in a PIC, along with code examples, the book you want is the PIC Midrange Reference Manual. You can find it here: http://www.microchip.com/1010/suppdoc/refernce/midrange/index.htm This is an invaluable document for both novices and experts alike. 3) Don't get swamped reading. Working through tutorials is good. Working on a live project is better. The first gives you an overview of what can be done while the second helps to define what it is that you need. 4) It's supposed to be fun, so treat it that way! > Dont have a question this time..(or may be is to basic to ask you > guys)..just wanted to introduce myself. Well welcome to the list. As for questions one HowTo I've found very helpful is Eric Raymond's "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way.": http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Hope it helps, BAJ -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.