First let me commend you for even considering such an
impressive project.  Not a lot of 14 year olds would even
think in those terms, much less be willing to try.

Second, let me attempt to encourage you to attempt
a less impressive scope for your project.  For someone
who hasn't done much embedded work, just getting a
PIC to write to an LCD and read a keypad is a laudable
goal.  To that end, you can use almost any 40-pin PIC
(see 18F4420, 18F452, 18F458, 16F877/877a) to do
it quite easily, or if you want to have some real fun, a
28 pin can do it as well.  I recently did a 4x3 + LCD on
an 18 pin, but I'd not recommend that to anyone
unless absolutely necessary.

That said, I'd like to recommend that you tune down
the scope a bit.  Making a 16-bit scientific calculator
with floating point math would be an admirable project
in and of itself, as would a device capable of storing a
limited number of names and phone numbers.  The
project you are describing is the sort of thing that a
group of 4 senior level EE or CE students would try as
a final design project, and spend a full year on.  I
don't know when your project is due, but it's March
now and the end of school can't be that far off.

If you are really interested, let me point you towards
John Peatman's excellent book about the 18F452.  It
comes with a demo board (unassembled, but it does
include the parts list for ordering the bits from Digikey).
From what I remember of science fairs when I was 14,
a "Hello World" on an LCD would be enough to place.

Last point, consider working on this over several years.
You could do a three or four year project, with the
PDA as a final goal.

If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me
off-list, and I'll be more than happy to help you out with
your project as you need it.

Mike H.

>Hi there,
>I'm 14 years old and for a science fair project I'm making a personal
>organiser. I am fluent in C and asm, but I haven't worked much with
>embedded
>hardware before.
>The organiser needs plenty of eeprom memory for data storage and enough rom
>to contain programs to power the 16x2 lcd, keypad, a few small applications
>and a scientific calculator.
>Which brings me to my questions..
>Has anyone done something similar?
>What pic should I use?
>And, is there a pic available which is powerful enough and has enough i/o
>to
>control both my lcd, 5x4 keypad?
>
>Your help would be really appreciated as there isn't much support available
>at my school.
>
>Thanks,
>[arron]

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