The PIC BOB

BOB is a nice little board that can do a lot:

It can be a 4Axis CNC break out board to hook up to 4 PMinMO compatible open source standard drivers to a PC or Arduino. (click the link for a picture)
Connects to a PC parallel port.
Connects to an Arduino to make a nice Control panel, with LCD, switches, relay driver, external power, and up to 4 steppers.
You can stuff it with a Microchip PIC12F675, PIC16F675, PIC16F690, PIC16F1825 / PIC16F1829, PIC18F14K22, or a PIC18F14K50) (provides USB support, but at the cost of the analog input, and X and Y step) and a crystal or resonator.
And the PIC can connect to any of the RLC TTL serial adapters allowing RS232, USB, and (eventually) RF communications. (see note below about FTDI Friend)
It can host a standard 44780 LCD panel and provide backlighting or host the LCD1 Panel (adapting it to a the 44780 pinout)
It can mount 4 pushbutton switches with pull up resistors or 4 small 2 position screw terminals for easy wiring to external switches or sensors
It can drive an external relay (w/optional LED indicator)
It supports 6 LEDs (power indicator, relay indicator, and 4 driven LEDs)
It can host an LM335H temperature sensor.
It can host a MAX4080^ high side current sensor.
It can provide +5 volts from an unregulated power supply or battery.

And all of those can be connected in interesting ways. For example:

With the LM335H, LCD panel, and on board PIC you can make a thermometer.
Add the relay driver and switches, reprogram the PIC, and it's a thermostat.
With a clock crystal and some more programming the thermostat can be set for different temps at different times.
With the current sensor in place of the temperature sensor, its an ammeter or a current safety shutdown device.
The higher end PICs actually have enough power to provide ultra low cost motion control: Accepting G-Code commands from a PC (via the RLC3 USB adapter) and producing step and direction for several axis CNC Mill, etc... control.
PID servo control is very possible
Lower end PICs can still reach enough of the IO lines to provide a source of pulses of variable speed for testing stepper drivers, or whatever.

416012

Special Offer: Contribute source code, written to work on any of the PIC's supported by this board, using the pin assignments specified below, and receive a pair of boards, any of the parts listed above, and color printed copies of the schematic to use in implementing / debugging your code. All code must be released via an open source license such as GPL. All code must be written for freely available IDE/assembler/compilers such as MPLAB and the non-optimized, free, C compilers.

Changes between version 4-5 and version 6 are indicated in green

This spreadsheet lists the pins and shows how they are shared. Be sure to select the correct version in the tabs below.

The FTDI friend standard pinout does not match the BOB's serial connector pinout. Power and Ground are reversed. An FTDI has power on pin 3 and ground on pin 1, the BOB has power on pin 1 and ground on pin 3. Other that that... Ms. Lincoln... they are the same.

Mechanically, the board is 3.66" x 2.30" with 0.13" or 1/8" diameter mounting holes positioned as follows:
(measured from the left and bottom of the PCB when upright; LCD and switch silkscreen visable)

# From
Left Bottom

1 3.20", 0.10"

2 1.20", 0.10"

3 0.10", 0.50"

4 3.55", 1.13"

5 0.10", 2.15"

#	From Left	Bottom
1	3.20",	0.10"
2	1.20",	0.10"
3	0.10",	0.50"
4	3.55",	1.13"
5	0.10",	2.15"