PIC Programming on Mac OS X

Lately, I've begun working on home automation to wire up my entire house with all kinds of goodies. The hobbyist in me, and with an attempt to be frugal, I'm skipping off-the-shelf solutions and building my own. A friend of mine calls me crazy, that it will reduce the value of my house, etc. Whatever. This is some fun stuff!

A big part of these systems is wiring together sensors and activators. You need something to control all of these things. There are a gazillion various solutions, with the obvious ones being an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and their GPIO pins (among many other features they have). I decided on a layered approach with "small brains" connected to the sensor, managing the specifics, then communicating upstream to a larger brain. I'll likely talk about the upstream bits in a later post, but this one is dedicated to the small brain: the PIC 16F688 microcontroller.

I grew up on a 6502 microprocessor. Graduated to a 68000 when it arrived in the Mac 128k. And after that, never really worried about machine/assembly code. As I looked around for microcontrollers, I ran into the 16F688 on SparkFun. This is a crazy chip -- the number of features packed into a tiny 14-pin DIP is simply incredible compared to where I came from. A couple key features that pointed me at this chip: UART on board, and about $2 per part. This allows me to do stuff such as communicate to serial sensors (such as the Zilog ePIR IR sensor), use bit-banging to communicate to I2C sensors (such as the MPR121 capacitive touch sensor), measure voltages for security systems and temperature (TMP36), ... and all in a tiny and cheap package.

Next up is programming the dang thing. I've got a programmer and my Macbook. This post will document the steps needed to get some code running on the PIC. (to help others, and if I have to retrace these steps in the future)

First, you will need the following software packages installed:

• pk2cmd (download from Microchip)
  This uses a standard configure; make; make install
  
• gputils (see their SourceForge project)
  I used "make mac105", then symlink'd "pk2cmd" and "PK2DeviceFile.dat" into my PATH
  Note: I did not setuid-root on the binary (as the docs seem to suggest). It seems to operate fine with my login id.

When I plug my programmer into the USB port and run "pk2cmd -P" it detects my PIC16F688. Woot!

And for a basic "Hello World" to test my setup, I wrote a "blink an LED" program. Download that and type "make install" and it should assemble and load the program onto the PIC sitting in your programmer. Yank out the PIC, wire up RA0 to an LED tied to Vdd (I used a 680Ω resistor), and apply power. The LED should blink at you.

Not that hard!

If it doesn't? Well. Not like you can bring up Visual Studio and debug this thing. The program works for me, and the wiring is dead simple, so I wouldn't know where to point you.

Next up: switch my blinky program to use the chip's Sleep Mode and interrupts [rather than a busy loop]. Less power consumption!