The pic demoboard DP-113 as sold by Sure Electronics is a neat fine board to start with using Microchip controllers. Based on the 18F4520 it contains everything needed. A 16 x 2 character LCD display, 4 7-segment LED-display, 4 smd type LED's, a buzzer and 3 input buttons. Furthermore a USB-serial converter chip CP2102 is installed. The provided driver adds a virtual COM-port so you can communicate with the DP-113 through its serial port. Together with the LM-75 I2C temperature sensor and a 24C02N EEPROM it makes a complete board to start your microcontroller project. The board can be powered by an external regulated 5 Volt DC supply or by fed through the USB via an attached computer. In the later case you should take care not to overload that circuit (appr. 500mA max. capacity) when you attach further circuits and/or LED, relais etc. The original rev.1 board does not have the USB connector fitted, instead it has the standard RS-232 9-pole socket fitted.
As you can see in the figure below most I/O points are available on standard SIL 2.54mm pitch connectors (connectors are not factory-fitted, you'll have to add and solder them on the board them yourself). It also has the "standard" ICSP connector as used with the PIC KIT2 programmer and the ICD2 programmer (also not fitted as you can see in fig.1). Because the DP-113 has all the most needed I/O (LCD, LEDs, buttons & speaker) already fitted on the board it makes a nice small development board all together. Just attach a USB-cable to a computer and your developmentboard is up and running!
fig.2 DB-113 rev.2 board
fig.2 DB-113 board with attached PicKit2 programmer
So for your first steps and "live" experiments you'll need:
DP-113 PIC 18F4520 demoboard
Pickit 2 (compatible) programmer
2 USB cables as supplied with board and programmer
suitable programming enviroment (for example. PIC18 simulator and Pickit2 software)
Pickit 2 (compatible) programmer
2 USB cables as supplied with board and programmer
suitable programming enviroment (for example. PIC18 simulator and Pickit2 software)
PC with at least 2 free USB ports
and .... lots of time to spend fumbling around with the items
Furthermore you can add a simple 6 wired cable to detach the programmer from the board as shown in figure 2.
As an example here is the democode as used to interface a DE-DP-30 64x32 5 mm LED dot matrix info board to the DP-113 board.
It is a slightly modified version of the code provided by Sure Electronics. Further info will follow.
