underclock your PIC!

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

PIC microprocessor, that is. But why? because, suppose you are using the PIC to generate a triggered envelope, or a LFO, or whatever.
Now imagine that instead of running it at 10MHZ oe whatever, you run the clock at half speed.. yes, it works just the same! only half as fast.
Thre certainly have been times when I would have liked to be able to run a complex envelope generator at variable speed.
PICs are cheap enough, that they should be the 555 of today, the mistake people make is to try to do EVERYTHING inside a single one. That's a bad idea for two reasons,
1. everything gets messy
2. you run out of ins & outs
3. you lose modularity of physical design.
You might think resistor or voltage control of a 10MHz clock is difficult, but it isn't. (if the books are to be believed..)

[R.G.]

Welcome to the revolution.
===========================================

By the way, PICs are static devices - that means there is NO lower limit on the clock. You can run them from a 555 clock at 1Hz. That is itself a profound result.

However, you missed the motivation for the single PIC. To the PIC subculture, mine-is-bigger-than-yours is measured by how much you can get in one.

Yes, communicating PICs makes sense, especially when they have built in I^2C or SPI links, but then you have to do the overhead of real-time communications. Expanding the I/O with a universal shift register or two is a viable alternative to using up all your real-time stuff on communication.

[Ry]

Guys,

Can you recommend a reasonably priced PIC programmer package?  Are there any that you know of that might run on a Mac with only usb and firewire ports?

I'm finally interested enough to give this a shot.

Ry

[Hal]

http://www.sparkfun.com/shop/index.php?shop=1&cart=186566&cat=3&

I'm getting the really cheep parallel one from them...they don't seem to have such great deals on USB, but idk...

[Gilles C]

http://www.winpicprog.co.uk/

http://www.lpilsley.freeserve.co.uk/pdf/p16pro40.pdf

Inever got the serial one to work.

The parallel one works like a charm.