Microcontroller Programmers

Category Archives: Microcontroller Programmers

Amicus18: Arduino-style platform for PIC fans

Posted on September 4, 2011 by R-B 7 comments

Arduino needs no introduction; it is an easy-to-use yet powerful open source embedded system development platform that has gained huge amount of popularity in past few years, specially among hobbyists. The standard hardware consists of an 8-bit Atmel AVR processor with on-board headers providing access to its I/O pins. The processor is pre-programmed with a serial bootloader that simplifies the uploading of user programs to the on-chip flash memory without the need of any external programmer. Because of its low cost, user-friendly software development environment (open-source C/C++ like programming platform), rich set of libraries, and tons of resources available online,

In-Circuit Debugging of PIC microcontrollers

Posted on July 31, 2011 by R-B 6 comments

An In-Circuit Debugger (ICD) is a very powerful and effective tool for real-time debugging of a microcontroller-based system at hardware level. It allows you to run, halt and single step the program while the target microcontroller is embedded in the actual circuit. Once halted, the program variables, Special Function Registers (SFRs), RAM and EEPROM locations can be examined and modified in real-time, thus assists the designer in debugging the firmware and hardware together. In this article, I am going to describe the In-Circuit Debugging technique in PIC microcontrollers, and demonstrate the debugging procedure with a test project using the PIC16F887 microcontroller. Although the operation of

MikroElektronika releases their latest universal development board that supports multiple microcontroller architectures

Posted on April 14, 2011 by R-B One comment

Mikroelektronika has released their latest version of universal development board, UNI-DS6, that supports eight different microcontrollers, namely PIC16F887, PIC18F8520, dsPIC30F6014A, Atmega128, CY8C27643, LPC2148, LPC2214, and AT89S8253. A separate mikroBoard for each of these microcontrollers are available, which can be inserted into the main development board so that you can perform experiments with your choice of microcontroller while the rest of the board remains the same. Each of the mikroBoards consists of an on-board programmer so no external programmer is required. The development board is fully featured with regulated power supply, external 12-bit ADC, USB-UART support, USB connector, serial EEPROM, standard

Choosing a PIC Programmer

Posted on November 5, 2010 by R-B 25 comments

If you are a beginner in the world of PIC microcontrollers then you will probably have this question in your mind: Which programmer should I buy? This is an obvious question because there are tons of PIC programmers available from various vendors and if you search on the various online technical discussion forums for their reviews, everybody has his own opinion. This will confuse you more, and you will be ended up with nothing. I would suggest, just buy one that you can afford and that fulfills your need. Having said that, I won’t recommend to buy one that requires

A simple parallel port programmer for ATMEL’s 20 pin microcontrollers

Posted on October 27, 2010 by R-B Leave a comment

We hardly look for a programmer like this now a days because parallel ports are gone in modern desktop computers and laptops. However, if you still have got your old computer somewhere at a corner of your house, this programmer circuit might be useful to you. This programmer supports AT89C1051, AT89C2051, and AT89C4051 microcontrollers from ATMEL and uses an LPT (Line Print Terminal) port to communicate with the host computer. The programming software is free to download for non-commercial or personal use. You can download both DOS and Windows versions of the programming software. Circuit diagram of the programmer (Source: