As part of my sabbatical activities I took on the "Temps Pratiques" microcontroller laboratory sessions for electrical engineering and mechatronics students at INSA Strasbourg. In pre-sabbatical discussions with faculty and staff at INSA Strasbourg I found out that the students were learning using what I considered to be outdated technologies. The PIC16F84A microcontroller chip used […]
I recently updated my MPLAB X installation to version 5.10. The compiler hasn't changed, just the IDE. Two surprises occurred. First is that my SAMD board now crashes the IDE when I plug it in. Only on Windows 10 on my HP tablet. Works fine on my Mac. But I won't get into that today. […]
I'm getting set to teach a lab course at INSA Strasbourg in France, using PIC16 microcontrollers. My colleagues and I have made the decision to update the course from using the classic PIC16F84 to the more capable PIC16F1619. The '1619 is a bit more complex (a downside) but has debugging capability, like breakpoints (a big […]
As my deadline for producing teaching material for the PIC16 boards at INSA Strasbourg approaches, I'm running into real world debugging issues. Now, it's important to point out that I'm trying to make sure that my teaching material is debugging-focused and provides an opportunity for self-directed learning. The first attempts at running a program on […]