On 13/02/2008, Harrison wrote: [...] > Gotta start from somewhere... As I understand it you are eager to start off hacking the LCD-module immediately. However, I *strongly* recommend you to start at the very beginning. Starting off with microcontrollers is usually a pretty big leap, so I really recommend you to learn how to walk before you run. Learning assembler before embarking with C is often a useful advice, that way you will learn the somewhat hard gotchas with could be pretty frustrating to handle if you don't know what happens "under the hood", that is - if you go for C-code at a start. Learn assembler and how do blink a LED using your microcontroller. Pretty boring, but that will be enough for a start. This way, you will get dirty without hurting yourself. There are a lot of tutorials on the net, but most of them (all?) are for the now deprecated PIC16F84-device, and 99% of the tutorials teach how to code with absolute adressing. While absolute adressing itself is fine for small and non-scaleable projects, it's a real braindead method for larger projects (such as the one you are describing). For that, the relocatable way is the way to do. If you are into books, I heartily recommend "The quintessential PIC microcontroller" by Sid Katzen. Buy, or borrow, it, read page by page atleast a couple of chapters, and then you will be able to start off by diving down the hardware. You will also need a hardware programmer. That is, a device that transfer your code (compiled C-code or assembler, or basic or whatever your preference is) into the microcontroller, making it able to run the code. There are zillions of programmers available, but a good start is the Wisp648 (made by Wouter van Ooijen on this mailing list). It's cheap and easy to use. Also, Wouter has written a very good FAQ about PICs, so you might want to start there as well: http://www.voti.nl/picfaq/index.html I could have missed some gaps, but I'm sure someone else gladly will fill it in. -- - Rikard - http://bos.hack.org/cv/ -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist