New (to me) PIC dev kits from CCS

For stand-alone microprocessors

New (to me) PIC dev kits from CCS

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:06 pm

Pursuant to some alt energy projects around here, I've just gotten some new PIC dev kits from CCS (the people who make the compiler and tools I like best at present). OF course, these kinds of things never stay limited to just the project you had in mind at the time - which itself sometimes never gets completed as originally envisioned anyway due to changes in thinking and situation. But I think both of these were decent scores.

One was the "EZWedLynx" dev kit - $149. This contains two tiny webservers (which you can also buy in onesies later for around $50 ea) based on a pic. The whole web server is about the size of my thumb past the last knuckle - tiny, and the one I bought draws 170 ma at 5v. These incorporate an enhanced version of HTML (some new tags) that can do things like read and write i/o pins - which include 10 bit a/d conversion, a counter, and a pwm output, as well as uart serial and I2C. Doesn't look like a lot of the pic is left over after that, and they aren't blinding fast (10 mb ethernet), but should be more than good enough for quite a few projects around here. There's a wireless model too - but for me, not worth it yet, I've got the wiring anyway around here. These come with a programmer/eval board to make it easy to set them up in the first place (eg set them for your network DHCP, DNS, Netmask and so on) but once you've done it once, you learn you don't really need that other than to have a bunch of leds and pots and such to make code testing easy.

I can think of quite a number of simple automation tasks around here that even this moderately limited controller could handle - and add ether net and now I can do it from anywhere around the campus with any sort of manual override - and data logging - I desire. Yeah, DJ's could make these, but at the price there's little point - they didn't do a bad design there. Plenty flash for a decent web page. They do UDP, TCP<>rs232 and all sorts of other nice stuff already.

The other one I got is the CAN bus dev kit. This has quite a few interesting features. It contains two master nodes done different ways - one using a PIC with CAN support built in, another with a cheaper pic and an add-on peripheral that does can bus. Then there are two "dumb" nodes, which might be the most interesting of all, as the chips are dirt cheap, and actually not that dumb. They can sit out there and broadcast a/d results, digital I/O, pwm - all kinds of cool things for about 4 bucks a node. This would be a much lower overhead/cheaper network for some home automation than ethernet per node for one thing.

The real reason I got this is to interface with an existing CAN bus system - my solar power stuff, which is Xantrex and uses a proprietary protocol on top of CAN to interconnect things. So I needed at least one node's worth to talk to that stuff. In fact, the way they did it, they have some serious limits on number of nodes within their own protocol, so to even support my home size system, I may have to break up the stuff into two smaller networks with more of a star coming out of the master controller I'm going to build for myself. CAN tends to be - if something has something to say, it talks, if you want something, you listen until you get it. Trouble with that is a lot of nodes can cause so many collisions as to shut the bus down if things are chatty - and the Xantrex stuff is very chatty. Yeah, it's lame, and their "solution" doesn't work well, so I'm just going to roll my own here.

The first project is to do that, make it controllable and loggable over ethernet, and add control for diversion loads. One will be the new Volt which can be a killer load with the fast charger I got (3.5kw), and another is a water distillation unit I have, and sometimes need the water from. In the system as I'm upgrading it, there are times when there is just way too much power for battery charging alone, and if you don't use it, it falls on the ground. Might as well use those times to charge automobiles, distill water, perhaps heat in the winter or run AC in the summer - but doing all this manually as I have is a pain to say the least.

Better living through technology. I'm sure the tools and tricks gained here will also benefit the fusor stuff along the way!
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
User avatar
Doug Coulter
 
Posts: 3515
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

Return to Embedded software

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest