23 Aug 2010

Serial Communications is a pretty basic way of interacting with a device - but used in the right way it can be a very powerful method of communicating and even debugging.  After getting some LEDs to blink (of course!) the serial library was one of the first to be written for the PicPack library.  So after three years of hammering away at it, we have a pretty robust library of code that has been reliably used in many microcontroller projects, on many different types of PICs.  We've updated the serial tutorial to give you a fresh view of serial communications, including the new terminal library that makes constructing the framework to communicate with your PIC even easier.

21 Aug 10

If you've been reading Elektor's recent article on creating a scrolling led message board you might be inspired to include a LED display panel in you're project - and we have new stock of several different types.

This new panel is 80 pixels wide by 8 pixels high, has bi-colour pixels and is an ideal size for displaying scrolling text.  Of course, if you want a bigger panel, something compatible with the Sure Electronics 6432 or 6416 LED panels, you'll find that we carry surprisingly similar devices at great prices!  We have some new LED display panels coming online shortly, so check back soon.  Oh, and of course driver kits to handle the display refreshing as well. Enjoy!

5 August 2010

You can never have too many LEDs, we always say.  PicPack user Ben Delarre certainly thinks so to and has a project to prove it.  For this year's Burning Man festival in the middle of the Nevada desert, he is putting together a LED-filled ping pong ball matrix that's 16 by 16 pixels, measuring 1m by 1m.

The LEDs are driven by MAX6964 chips and these are in turn controlled by PIC microcontrollers.  What's remarkable about Ben's project is not that any "pixel" can be set to any RGB colour, but the fact that you can create animations for the "Illuminatrix" via his team's web site.  This can be done frame by frame, or it can even be programmed using javascript, meaning all sorts of creations are possible.  He encourages readers to go and create their own, and these will be displayed at the entrance to the More Carrot Theme Camp for the duration of the festival.

We're looking forward to seeing pictures of the display as it progresses, and we hope to bring you more information about how Ben went about building the hardware and software when all those LEDs have been safely soldered in place. In the mean time their web site is definitely worth a visit to see some of the animations that have been created and get some inspiration for your own microcontroller based project.

30 July 2010

We're delighted to announce the first of many in our new modules category.

Ever wanted to learn how to solder surface mount devices?

Hidden on the underside of this tiny module you'll find two surface mount SOIC-sized parts, a Real Time Clock (RTC) and temperature sensor.  It's a simple module, and designed to be low cost so you can try your hand at soldering surface mount devices without feeling too bad if you do get it wrong.  But we expect that you'll have no problems and end up with a pretty useful module.  Of course, because it's an Embedded Adventures module, you'll get complete source code (see the rtc_temp_sensor_module directory in PicPack 3.01), schematic, datasheet, in fact everything you need to make the most of it.

28 July 2010

We've updated the PicPack library with a few quick changes.

One of our customers asked about stringing lots of LDP-6416 LED Display Panels together, so we put together some 2, 3 and 4 panel demos (see draw_ea_ldp6416_multi_2 and so on in the demo directory).  You can daisy chain these displays together to produce some very long displays!

Also, we've been debugging the USB stack to be more robust with Vista and improve performance using ping-pong (double) buffering.  Demos will follow soon, but the main USB code is available.

Check it out in the download section.