PIC Projects for Non-Programmers

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Product Description

Microcontrollers are everywhere: from cellphones to robots they are the brains behind the electronics revolution. The PIC is one of the leading microcontrollers for professional applications, but also the first choice for experimenters and students.Now you can build your own tried and test projects along with best-selling author John Iovine. John presents 10 projects with all the introductory material that you need to get up and running. What makes this book special is the symbolic compiler that is used throughout the book and provided for FREE on an accompanying CD-ROM. New professionals and graduates will be able to understand how PICs work before learning a programming language and hobbyist can start building now!

Projects include LEDs, maze-running robots, and the Grey Walters turtle. All of this is provided with step-by-step instruction and full color diagrams and photographs.


*Gets the reader up and running fast with a quick review of basics and then onto the 10 tried and tested projects in FULL COLOR
*No languages to learn: simply drag and drop the icons, plug in the settings ? and your PIC will respond to your commands
*Bonus 3 extra projects on the companion Web site!

PIC Projects for Non-Programmers Review

In my opinion graphical programming languages are underrated. Back in the day, Mac programmers for example made good use of Prograph, and today video magicians can do all kinds of things with Quartz Composer. Lego Mindstorms users frequently start out with a dialect of LabVIEW. On the whole, it's a good way to get started with understanding programming, and it's really quite a good thing that a book like this is available.

Of course it's a Newnes book, so there will be the odd Britishism to negotiate, but that's not a terribly large problem (especially since the author is American and therefore there will be fewer than most). The book does seem to benefit from some basic electronics expertise, although it doesn't seem strictly necessary. The projects broadly break down into digital I/O (including an LCD screen), analog/digital conversion, and appliance control, which is a good base to start with for the typical embedded systems hacker. It doesn't include much in the way of finished projects; most of them are just tech demos that can be used in cookbook style. The software it uses, Flowcode, is commercial software, but a stripped-down educational version is available from the book's website; it's a Windows program but apparently works on WINE on Linux or Mac OS X as well. (I suspect, but do not know for sure, that you can also use the open source KTechLab program on Linux, but since KTechLab is based on an older version of KDE, it may not run on any other environment without severe hacking. If you know how to do that, you probably don't need this book.)

There's one big thing missing here, though. There's no base for stepping outside the graphical environment; a smattering of PIC assembly code might be helpful, if only for debugging use, but also to help the programmer step up to more mainstream coding. For a hobby coder, this won't necessarily be a problem (especially since hobby projects tend to lean towards Atmel AVR and ARM for the most part anyway), but someone trying to put this on their resume will want to know where to go next and will probably have to take a shot in the dark. Don't let that scare you away though.

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