Trevor's Electonics Blog

Last Tuesday (27 Jul 2010) I attended a meeting at the South Australian PIC User Group (SAPUG) which was excellent. A great bunch of people that are all keen to help. Ian from The Leon Audio Company gave a talk on how to use MOSFET’s with a PIC and some things to watch out for. They are a great device, but needs to be used in the right way or you destroy your PIC MCU. The group is planning a weekend of activities in October so keep the weekend of 16^th and 17^th free and keep an eye on the groups web site for details at http://www.users.on.net/~sapug/

One of the 120 pin PICtail Plus connectors on the Explorer 16 Development Board.

The Explorer16 is packed with a whole lot of stuff in a very small package. Making sense of it all can be a bit challenging when first getting it out of the box and playing with it. Anyway I’ve put this table together (and it’s also available as a spreadsheet download). It shows all the connections on the Explorer 16 development board from the perspective of the 120 pin PicTail Plus connector. 

The PICtail Plus connector is arranged into logical sections of 2 x 30 pin sections and a 60 pin section. The two 30 pin sections contain most of the communications and power data lines with a small number of standard I/O. The 60 pin section picks up on the rest of the ports on the MCU with whole banks of I/O .  Microchip also have blank prototype boards with labelled edge connectors and break-out pins for all the data lines on the PICtail Plus.

I ended up buying the add-on connector and soldering it to my board to provide flexibility for future projects. I’m not ready for them just yet but sure I’ll end up getting there.

Anyway, onto the table. The highlighting is to help identify which side of the connector the particular data line is on.

The Excel file for the above table is here.

Here is what the spreadsheet covers

The Explorer 16 Development Board 100pin version (DM240001)
- Switches/pots/leds
- JTAG connector
- PICkit2 programmer
- ICD2
- U2 PIC18F4550
- U3 MAX3232
- U4 Temp Sensor TC1047A
- U5 EEPROM 25LC256
- U6 Multiplex/Demultiplex CD74HCT4053PWR
- U7 Multiplex/Demultiplex CD74HCT4053PWR
- LCD (1) Truly TSB1G7000

The following Plug In Modules (PIM) for the above board
- PIC24FJ128GA010 100 pin PIM (MA240011)
- PIC24HJ256GP610A 100 pin PIM (MA240012) (nb same as PIC24HJ256GP610 but handles higher temps)
- dsPIC33FJ256GP710 100pin PIM (MA330011)
- PIC32MX360F512L 100 pin PIM (MA320001)
- PIC32MX460F512L 100 pin PIM (MA320002)

The following PICtail and PICtail Plus add-on expansion boards:
- SD/MMC PICtail (AC164122)
- Fast 100mb Eth PICTail Plus (AC164132) (nb: only the SPI interface at the moment. PMP coming)
- Graphics LCD Controller PICtail™ Plus v3 SSD1926 Board (AC164127-5) with:
  – 5-wire touch sense & disp backlight
  – (U1) SSD1926
  – EEPROM (U3) SST25VF016B-50-4C-S2AF
  – (U2) MT29F2G08AADWP