Forrest W Christian wrote: > I've been looking for a good development board to be able to do proof > of concept designs on. Check out my QuickProto-01 at http://www.embedinc.com/products. > Mainly I'm talking simply about a 16f877 (or similar - just need a PIC > with a reasonable clock speed and most of the peripherals - something > else is ok) The QuickProto-01 supports 16 and 18 family PICs with the standard 28 pin footprint. Examples are the 16F876, 18F252, 18F2520, etc. > compatible socket on a board with a crystal oscillator It has pads for both a standard HC-49 thru hole and CSM-7 surface mount crystal. 22pF loading caps are provided, although they can be easily removed if you are using a ceramic resonator. The HC-49 footprint has a middle ground pad for resonators, in which case you should remove the 22pF caps. There are also pads for a timer 1 watch crystal and loading caps. > and a ICD connector with simple connectivity to an RJ11 jack, The QuickProto-01 has a RJ-12 jack for the target PIC programming lines so that it is directly compatible with a ICD-2. It also includes a little extra filtering to avoid the PGC/PGD crosstalk problem. See http://www.embedinc.com/picprg/icsp.htm for details of the crosstalk problem. > and possibly a 7805 or similar. I didn't use a 7805, but there is a rough 5.5-6.0V supply from a switcher, then a LDO linear regulator to make a nice clean 5.0V for the PIC. The unregulated DC input voltage, the rough 5.5V, and the clean 5.0V supplies are all available in the breadboard area. > Push buttons, There is a pushbutton for each of the RB4-RB7 interrupt on change lines, and a master reset pushbutton. > Pots, LCD, RS232 transciever, etc. etc. etc. are nice, No pots or LCDs since they would be too specific to only a few projects. The QuickProto-01 does have RS-232 tranceivers with built-in DB-9 connector. You can connect it to a PC COM port with a straight thru male to female extension cable. This board also has 8 debug lines that are displayed with two LEDs each, one is lit on input high and the other on input low. This allows you to see when a line is pulsing in addition to being high or low. > but a lot of the boards that > have them have the irritating property that they are hardwired to the > PIC and require slicing of PCB Traces and careful soldering iron work > to extract those signals when you need them for something other than > the board's concept of what they should be used for. So, if the > board has those addons, I need them to be easily > disconnectable/reconnectable. The RS-232 transceiver and the debug LEDs each have a jumper that can be removed to power them down. The UART signals are also isolated from the RS-232 transceiver by jumpers that can be removed by hand. The input and output of the LDO are isolated with hard-wired jumpers in case you have unusual power available and implement part of the power supply yourself. These are soldered wires and are intended to be cut if not wanted. > I also need to be able to use this easily with a solderless > breadboard. All the PIC signals are brought out to labeled double pads. These can be wired to the on-board breaboard, or you can connect them to your own breadboard by soldering wires in the pads. Once you get your circuit figured out, you can implemented on the on-board breadboard area to make everything self-contained and more reliable. The breadboard area has a ground plane and decoupling caps at each end of the power busses, so the signal integrity will be better than a solderless breadboard. ****************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, (978) 742-9014. #1 PIC consultant in 2004 program year. http://www.embedinc.com/products -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist