Microchip Delivers PIC Development Tool For $49

Oct. 31, 2006

Microchip is a major player in the microcontroller arena with its PIC family. Its new PICkit 2 Debug Express lets developers get started for only $49.

William G. Wong

Microchip's PICkit 2 Debug Express (Fig. 1) is only $49 but it includes everything you need to get started on 8-bit PIC development. The target board has a 44-pin, 14Kbyte flash PIC16F917 chip. It has an on-chip 8MHz oscillator, I²C, SPI, and a USART. The board has a patch area for surface mount chips suitable for hand soldering. The chip can handle an LCD display although there is none on the board or space for one to be installed. There are 8 LEDs that can be connected to IO pins.

The PICkit 2 USB-based debugger plugs into the development board and works with most other PIC development boards as well assuming they have the right header. It works with Microchip's MPLAB IDE and assembler.

Related Links Microchip
www.microchip.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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