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This mini breakout board is designed to simplify prototyping and experimentation work with the popular 18-pin PIC16F series microcontrollers. It is small in size (1.95″ X 0.75″) and is breadboard friendly.
Mini breakout board for 18-pin PIC16F series microcontrollers
It supports PIC16F84A, PIC16F628A, PIC16F88, PIC16F648A, PIC16F1827, PIC16F1847, and other 18-pin microcontrollers in the same series. Read more
The Graphical LCD (GLCD) displays provide more flexibility in presenting data, as compared to standard character-based LCDs. Owing to a significant drop in price lately, GLCDs have become more popular these days in the hackers’ and DIY worlds. If you are planning on doing an embedded microcontroller project including a graphical LCD display, you might be interested in this PIC-based GLCD development kit from iCircuit Technologies. This decently priced development kit will help you to get started quickly with your project. Here’s a brief review of the kit.
PIC-based GLCD development kit from iCircuit Technologies
Because of their compact size, ease of use and many built-in peripherals, the 18-pin PIC16F series processors (PIC16F628A, PIC16F88, and now PIC16F1827/47) have always been my favorite microcontrollers. Many of my projects and tutorials written in this blog also use PIC16F628A and PIC16F1827 microcontrollers. As I will be using them more in the future too, I thought of making some PCB versions of my breadboard module for PIC16F628A with some modifications. I used Iteadstudio’s PCB prototyping service for this, and I would say the PCBs turned out really well for the price I paid. I used their 2 layer 5cm x 5cm service and got 10 PCBs for less than $15, including shipping to the United States.
Mini breadboard module for 18-pin PIC microcontrollers
Here’s another breadboard module that carries a PIC16F628A microcontroller. The power supply pins and the I/O ports of the PIC16F628A microcontroller are accessed through male headers. It can be easily plugged into a breadboard and is very useful for quick prototyping. It frees up a lot of space on the breadboard since the oscillator, reset, and ICSP circuits are already built on the module. It is different from the previous PIC16F688 breadboard module in the way that the microcontroller now runs with an external 4.0 MHz crystal. So, this module will be more appropriate for experiments that require accurate timing calculations. Besides, the PIC16F628a microcontroller allows you to read/write 8-bit data directly through PORTB, which is 8-bit wide (none of the ports in PIC16F688 were 8-bit wide).
The layout and the circuit diagram of the module is shown below. The module has ICSP header pins for in-circuit programming, a reset switch, and an LED as power-on indicator. It provides easy access to all the pins of PORTB, and RA0 through RA4 pins of PORTA. Pins RA6 and RA7 are used for external crystal connections, whereas RA5 is input only pin and is used for reset circuit.
Component layout
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