Digital Timer Wish List

[Noggin]

Wow! I was very impressed with your board layout, but couldn't tell if your first jpg was a prototyping board or a production quality pcb, with surface-mount capability. Your board even has all the production quality part-reference silk-screening. I too have often fought the urge to "re-invent the wheel". I checked out the specs of the PIC32MXXXX line of Microcontrollers, and they are certainly a far cry from the 30-year-old Micro-Cs my in-house automation gear is built around. Microchip's web-site indicated the availability of PC compatrable development boards, but I am curious --- Can the PIC32 be programmed directly from, the PC (with suitable development software), via the USB port?

Thanks!

You cannot program the PIC32 directly from the PC without the use of a bootloader. I'll likely use a uSD bootloader when I'm finished with development. It will allow me to load a new file over WiFi to the uSD card and then reboot it, then the bootloader will kick in and load the new program. If something goes wrong, I can always pull the uSD card and manually put a new file on it to be loaded in as well. A PICkit3 is about $35 and is a pretty decent programmer and would be a good option for a hobbyist and is what I'm using. The nicer programmers are faster and have slightly better debugging capabilities, but are several hundred dollars. The IDEs (MPLAB 8 and MPLAB X) are free and the compilers are free but don't have optimization. MPLAB 8 is a mature and reliable IDE while MPLAB X is new and feature rich and a little on the buggy side.

I currently have the uSD, real time clock, and USB working at the moment. I'm about to start working on the WiFi module. Once I get it operational, it'll be time to start tying everything together which is the part that I find to be the most fun!