MX150 board issues

If you're one of the people who has downloaded the MX150 board files I uploaded earlier, please accept my apologies. I realised that I've managed to break the PPS mapping on the board definition files which makes working with the board more frustrating than it should be. Once I've fixed the problem and tested it thoroughly, I will make the files available again and put up a new post.

The bootloader itself is not affected by this, so any chips you've flashed it to will be fine.

MX150 "board"

I said that I would publish the bootloader, board definition files and pinout map for the PIC32MX150B chip within the MPIDE environment, and here it is. You can find the hex file for programming a blank chip, the source for the bootloader, and the three board files ready to go. The part I've been using these with looks like this so far:

Minimal PIC32MX150 setup!

Toying with PIC32MX150

For a project I'm toying with, I've needed a microcontroller with three comparators onboard. In this case, I've been playing with 28 pin PIC32 device, specifically the PIC32MX150F128B. Admittedly, this is mostly because I already have a few in the parts box! In a nutshell, you get 128K of FLASH, 32K of RAM, 5 PWM pins, 2 UARTs, 2 SPI/I2S interfaces, 20 GPIO pins, a charge time measurement unit and a 1Msps ADC with a 10 input mux, and no need for a crystal. In this post, I'm going to run through the PIC32-avrdude-bootloader, and MPIDE setup I needed to do to get this part up and running.

Trying to read from a linear CCD

I found some more time to play with the linear CCD that Billy had sent me. If you remember last time, I'd managed to get a working clock signal and I could "see" the output on an oscilloscope. In some ways, that was the easy bit! Actually getting the output into a digital form is harder than it looks.

Fun with a Linear CCD

Some time back, Billy gutted a USB scanner, so he could grab the fun parts like mirrors, steppers etc. He sent me the board with the sensor on it, in the vague hope I might be able to do something with it. Sadly, I didn't take a picture of the original board then. Initially, I looked over the board, and could identify the memory, the scanner USB chip, and the fact there was a linear CCD onboard. After figuring out there wasn't anything much I could do quickly, it sat on the side for a while. Eventually, I figured that I should do something with it, and if I was going to do anything with it, I'd need to figure out how to interface with the CCD. If nothing else, I figured this would be a good learning exercise.

PICKit2 and Fubarino SD

If you've been playing with a Fubarino SD, then you probably already know it's designed to be Arduino code compatible (as long as direct hardware access is avoided). However, I wanted to do something else with it, using MPLABX (The Microchip IDE). This is where things get a bit more interesting, and I haven't figured out all the answers yet. Basically, I wanted to update the firmware on a Roland Juno-D keyboard, and wanted some way of sending the data over.