17 November 2012

Ever wanted to know more about the peripherals available in PIC microcontrollers? Starting today we introduce a new tutorial series covering modules that help you get stuff done.  Sure, you can do everything by toggling indivudual pins - often referred to as "bit banging" - but the PIC microcontrollers contain a tonne of useful modules that do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

We start with the serial comms module - known as the Universal Synchronous Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter or USART, which proves that the engineers rule the roost in Microchip, not the marketing folks.

It has some pretty neat features, and if you're looking for a full software interface to this module, you can check out the pic_serial.c / .h files in the PIC Pack Library, again available in the downloads section of the website.