Been given a Picdem.net 2 Board today :)

[odessa]

As title,

Visited my wifes work today to see her boss. He manufactures Turnstiles and writes all the code for them himself using pics, hence my visit to sneek a peek and he gave me a .net 2 demo board !!.

Wow !! They're amazing .. Full integration with a Pic via a web browser with realtime updates,

Has anyone had any experience of these ?

Jay

[brad]

Nice score for you!

Had much time to experiment with it?

I haven't even heard of them before.

[odessa]

Hi,

No not yet as I need to make a cable to connect my pickit2 to the RJ11 socket. I've peeked at the code supplied supplied by Microchip for the TCPIP stack which is in C and it looks fairly easy to get a grip on. The plan is my wifes boss wants to embed this chip into his equipment for a remote monitoring application.

Its very impressive to see the board running, basically you can write a webpage to read/write to a pic then port it thorugh a Microchip app into an HTML coded page that is hosted on board the PIC.

You could then have a very easy user interface between whatever you design and your pic.

I really enjoyed seeing this technology in action and talking with someone who does this for a living ... it was a real nerdfest I loved it

[brad]

That sounds great!

I am quite keen to learn more about this. Especially now that I have started designing PC programs to help with my microcontroller projects (like graphic conversion software)

It would be nice to have some sort of interface to directly convert software and have it automatically programmed onto the pic (rather than going through a few different steps as I have to do now)

[odessa]

Got my pickit 2 connected today and had some fun

Its an amazing peice of kit. What I've done so far is work out how variables are controlled from a web page then sent to the pic, so for example you can have a form type page that has all the led's on port b selectable through a button type interace on your webpage then submit it and the pic will turn the corresponing led's on or off.

This is done using a standard form handling script in the html file then read in on the pic. You can use standard HTML files too, once ready to be uploaded to the pic you use microchips MPFS2 program and that converts then into a binfile that the chip recognises and displays.

I will put a little vid on you tube of a few simple things I've done, I can see this keeping me busy for a while

edit... I've just added a DynDNS server Brad so if we are both online you can connect to it and control it remotely .. how cool is that, I got my wife to connect from her work PC and have a go ... awesome

[brad]

Very impressed!

So it is interfaced via the pickit2 is it?

Is there anyway of interfacing it through USB without the pickit2? Alot of microcontrollers these days support interfacing directly to USB - this would be great for an end user (for whatever project) they could connect it straight to their computer with a standard USB cable and perhaps upload new data etc...

[odessa]

Yes, its got an RJ11 connector which threw me at first but its still the same connection set up so i made little adaptor . Not sure on the usb connection, there isn't one on the board but it would be a great help if it did.

[brad]

I am guessing that it can interface via your network with an rj11 cable?

[odessa]

No a standard RJ45 cable, the rj11 is just in place of the usual Sil6 for programming.

[brad]

Oh that's right, RJ11 is like a phone connector

[bitfogav]

Ive got a setup I used for my DMX Controller, I programme the microchip via RJ11

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=333

dmxcontback.jpg (11.67 KiB) Viewed 28611 times

The setup i used was some RJ11 breakout boards from ebay:

rj11forpickit2.jpg (21.12 KiB) Viewed 28611 times

[odessa]

LOL, thats the exact one I was looking at on Ebay ... actually its the only one on Ebay and seeing it was in Thailand or somewhere I made my own.

1.gif (30.58 KiB) Viewed 28610 times

2.gif (34.53 KiB) Viewed 28610 times

[bitfogav]

Very nice board indeed Jay

yeah that isn't the actually breakout board I got? but very similar, I found a supplier in the UK few months ago (actually through ebay) that made there own PCB kits for the pickit2.

[odessa]

Hi Gav,

Yeh, I had real problems trying to find that little adaptor anywhere, let alone the UK.

After I had made mine and tried to program the board it kept failing... Dont think the 2m long RJ11 cable helped

Still learning