TABLE OF CONTENTS This appendix contains the laboratory exercises for a semester-length course taught at Mississippi State University since summer 2004. We first began teaching a PIC-based introductory microprocessor course in fall 2003 using the PIC16F873, and switched to the PIC18F242 in summer 2004.
Table E.1 lists the lab equipment assumed by these experiments. Each lab station should have an oscilloscope and a multimeter. In addition, if each student does not have a portable PC, every lab station must have a desktop PC. Each lab station should either have a LAN connection or the lab should be wireless enabled.
| Equipment | Comment |
|---|---|
| Networked PC | Lab station only needs a LAN connection if student has a portable PC. |
| Multimeter | Basic instrumentation. |
| Oscilloscope | Basic instrumentation. |
| PICSTART Programmer | This is used for programming PICs with the serial bootloader and initial test programs; it can be shared among multiple stations. |
| Soldering and wire wrap tools/supplies | Either soldering or wire wrap is used for external connectors; multiple stations can share this. |
| Universal remote control | Used by Experiment 12 for IR waveform decoding. |
Because a serial bootloader is used to program the PIC18F242 in a majority of the hardware labs, each PC must either have a serial port or a USB-to-serial port adapter. The lab also must have some method of programming a PIC18F242 without a serial bootloader; we use a Microchip PICSTART Plus programmer (Appendix F, "The Jolt/Colt Serial Bootloaders") shared among 10 lab stations. Software installed on each PC to...
