See a list of recent topics presented at the PIC Club.

Meetings are held on the 2nd Tuesday of each month in the Sydney PC User Group rooms from 6 pm - 8 pm.  Each meeting includes a couple of 20-minute talks by members on their current PIC projects.  Printed handouts of schematics or program listings are usually provided by the speakers.

The club has a Windows XP desktop computer with a 512 Kb/s ADSL internet connection, a screen projector and a white-board.  The speakers can of course set up their own laptops for hardware and software demonstrations.

During and after the coffee break, there is ample time for general questions and answers with plenty of electronics advice on hand.  Anyone is welcome to bring along their PIC projects to discuss with the experts.

For more PIC related information, visit these member web-sites:

• Neville Hoffman
• Tony Colocci
• Steve O'Brien
• Alex Wong
• Bob Bunton
• David Meiklejohn
• Les Grant

PICSEND is a DOS program, originally written in Borland C++, designed to read and write data to a PIC via the printer LPT ports. For security reasons, Windows XP now prevents direct writing to hardware by user programs.  This means that output has to go via proper Windows drivers, and so the program will have to be rewritten.

We would use either Delphi or Visual Basic which does have suitable drivers available.

PICSEND can read machine code either from the PIC or from a .HEX or .OBJ file and can then disassemble it into source code in either MPASM or TASM formats.  These two differ mainly in the way hexadecimal numbers and equates are specified.

In TASM, the equates may be put anywhere in the file, but in MPASM they must appear before their first use.

MPASM format:

    INDF    equ     00h
    PCL     equ     02h
    STATUS  equ     03h
    FSR     equ     04h
    PCLATH  equ     0Ah
    INTCON  equ     0Bh

TASM format:

    INDF    .equ    $00
    PCL     .equ    $02
    STATUS  .equ    $03
    FSR     .equ    $04
    PCLATH  .equ    $0A
    INTCON  .equ    $0B