chipKIT Tutorial 1: Digital input and output

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Our first chipKIT tutorial is about reading and writing digital data (0 or 1) from and to an I/O pin of the chipKIT board. Digital inputs are useful to determine whether an incoming digital signal is logic HIGH or logic LOW. A simple application of digital input is reading the state of a push-button switch and perform some action based on if the switch has been pressed or not. Similarly, digital outputs are used by microcontrollers for many purposes, such as to enable or disable an external chip, drive LEDs and LCD displays, control relay switches, etc. In this tutorial,

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Getting acquainted with the chipKIT programming tool

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The overall process of designing a microcontroller-based system is divided into  two parts: designing the hardware of the system, and writing the control software for it. Before the design cycle begins, it is important to have good knowledge of the tools available for the chosen development platform. While we already explored the hardware features of the chipKIT UNO32 board in Exploring the chipKIT Uno32 board, it’s time to look at the software development process. The flowchart below gives an overview of how an application program is developed for the chipKIT board.

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Exploring the chipKIT Uno32 board

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The chipKIT Uno32 development board is based on the powerful PIC32MX320F128 microcontroller, which features a 32-bit MIPS processor core running at 80MHz, 128K of flash program memory, and 16K of SRAM data memory. The board can be powered via USB or an external power supply. The on-board USB-UART interface provides a communication path between the board and the MPIDE tool running on the PC. MPIDE stands for Multi-Platform Integrated Development Environment and is a complete tool for developing and downloading embedded applications into the chipKIT Uno32 board. Now let’s explore the chipKIT Uno32 board and its on-board features in more detail.

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A brief introduction to the chipKIT platform

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In order to understand the chipKIT platform, it is important to talk about Arduino first. Arduino is an easy-to-use and powerful open source environment for developing microcontroller based applications. It has gained huge amount of popularity in past few years, specially among hobbyists. Arduino has been a wonderful tool, introducing many people to the world of embedded electronics with little or no prior knowledge of electronics. The standard Arduino development boards are based on 8-bit Atmel AVR processors which are pre-programmed with a serial bootloader, and thus simplifies the uploading of user programs to the on-chip flash memory without the

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Tutorial series on chipKIT programming and interfacing

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chipKIT is an open source embedded development environment based on the popular Arduino platform. The major difference between the two platforms is the type of processor used in their hardware. The Arduino development boards are based on 8-bit Atmel microcontrollers which run at maximum clock speed of 16 MHz . On the other hand, the chipKIT hardware uses powerful 32-bit PIC processors running at 80 MHz clock, and thus provides improved performance over the traditional Arduino boards. I have started this new tutorial series on chipKIT, and I believe they will be helpful for beginners to start using this platform for

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