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INTRODUCING THE PACKET WHACKER

Part 1: Hitching a Ride on the Picdem.net
by Fred Eady

Start ý PICDEM.NET ý Whatýs in the PIC NIC Basket? ý Provisions ý The Packet Whacker ý Taking the Demo Out of the Board ý Programming ý Smoke Test ý Where to Go from Here ý Sources and PDF

PICDEM.NET

In my articles "PICing a Place on the LAN" and "When Problems Strike Your PICDEM Project" (Circuit Cellar, 136-137), which will be in the upcoming issues of the print magazine, I use the PICDEM.NET to demonstrate the basics of the RTL8019AS Ethernet IC. Although the name PICDEM.NET implies networking, thereýs a bit more to the PICDEM.NET than that. My PICDEM.NET arrived with a copy of TCP/IP Lean: Web Servers for Embedded Systems [1], a 9-VDC power brick, DE-9 male-to-female serial cable, Cat 5 crossover network cable, and the PICDEM.NET Internet Solutions CD-ROM.

The heart of the PICDEM.NET beats within the confines of a 40-pin socket that can house various Microchip microcontrollers. Besides being there for damage control and experimentation, the 40-pin socket can house the PIC18C452 and PIC18F452, as well. Off the showroom floor, the PICDEM.NETýs 40-pin socket is equipped with a PIC16F877 running at 19.6608 MHz. This demo PIC is pre-loaded with a TCP/IP stack from Iosoft. The pre-loaded firmware is primarily concerned with serving web pages and to accommodate the HTML. A Microchip 24LC256 EEPROM fills the 8-pin socket just to the left of the PIC16F877. The 24LC256 is a 32-KB device that is fed and read using a two-wire I²C interface.

A nice feature of the PICDEM.NET is the two-line LCD display. Each line can display 16 characters. With the LCD, you can display prompts such as error messages. To help ease the pain of integrating the LCD display, the PICDEM.NET CD-ROM contains drivers for the LCD display that can be ported to your application. The LCD display is also used by the demo firmware in the factory-supplied PIC16F877.

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