PIC Tutorial Zero - Programming
Obviously
one of the first things we need to know how to do is how to get the
program into the chip!. There are various programmers and software
available, some free, some shareware, and some commercial products. The
idea behind this series is of a low cost tutorial, so it will be based on
my free WinPicProg software, and any suitable parallel port hardware -
usually based on the original David Tait design. Personally I'm using the
P16PRO40 hardware, although this series will only be using an 18 pin chip,
we may introduce another chip or two later on, so it's worthwhile going
for the P16PRO40 rather than a programmer that only accepts 18 pin chips.
The circuit for the programmer is freely available (so you can build it
yourself if you like), and can be downloaded from my
WinPicProg page, there are various links there where you can buy kits
for the programmer as well.
Having
got the hardware, we now need to install the software, this requires two
downloads, one for the program itself, and one for the 32 bit driver DLL,
'port95nt.exe', download both programs from the link above and save them
to your hard drive. The driver should be installed first, simply run the
exe file and it will be installed on your computer, then unzip the 'winpicprog.zip'
file and store the two files in a suitable directory on your computer - I
haven't added an install program as it increases the size of the download
by a huge amount, and there's nothing complicated about installing it
manually - just put the two files in any directory you like.
Now,
make sure the programmer hardware is connected up and turned on, then run
WinPicProg, this will auto-detect which port you are connected to and
display the port address it uses. If this doesn't happen you may have a
hardware fault, or no power to the programmer, or a different programmer
that requires the I/O pins configuring differently. This can be done from
the 'Options/Hardware' menu option - however, if you use the P16PRO40
hardware the defaults that the program uses are correct.
Once
you have the programmer hardware connected and working, you need to try
programming a chip, to do this you select 'Open', either from the 'file'
menu or from the speedbutton just below - this produces a file-requester
where you can browse for the file you want, these files end in '.HEX' and
are files produced by MPASM, the MicroChip assembler. Simply select the
file you wish to load and click on the 'Open' button, the file will be
loaded and displayed in the HEX Buffer mode. To program the chip all you
have to do now if press 'Write', WinPicProg will give you a few messages
as it proceeds, and will display error messages and abort if it finds any
problems.