Experiment No. 1: 3-bit LED Up Counter

This is the first and the simplest project we are going to test on our PIC12F683 experiment board. We are going to make a 3-bit up counter that counts from 0 to 7. After 7, we are going to reset it to 0 and then start again, and so on. The 3-bit counter output will be displayed on 3-LEDs on the board. There will be a 1s delay between each up count.
Setup:
Connect GP0, GP1, and GP2 (pins 7, 6, and 5 of PIC12F683) to LEDs 3, 2, and 1 respectively.

 

Connect GPIO2, 1, 0 pins to LEDs 1, 2, 3 using jumper wires.

What else you need to start experimenting on this board?

After you finish constructing the development board, here are few more things to do before doing some real experiments with it.

• Of course, you need a 9V DC adapter for power supply. I sometimes use the power supply from my PIC programmer which derives power from a USB port of my computer. But do this only if you are sure that the experiment you doing draws current which is within the safe limit of the USB port.
• Next, you also need jumper wires to interconnect the various terminals while doing experiments.
• It depends on you what kind of platform you want to choose for programming the PIC. If you want to use assembly language, you need to download MPLAB. It is free to download from the Microchip website. You can also find an installation guide for this, which might be helpful. However, I prefer high-level language like C for programming my PIC. I am going to use mikroC compiler from Mikroelektronika for all the experiments I am going to show here. You can download a demo version of this compiler for free. The demo version restricts the output HEX file size to 2K, but we don't care because PIC12683 doesn't have programming memory more than that. So, you decide. 

Make Your Own PIC12F683 Microcontroller Development Board

Our purpose here is to explore the potential of PIC12F683 microcontroller for which we need a development board. The good thing is we are going to make our own board. The schematic and the actual board that I have built are shown below. I soldered all the components on a 12 x 8 cm general purpose prototyping board. 

 

Completed Board

It has following features in it:

1. A Regulated +5V power supply.

2. 3 Output LEDs that can be connected to any GPIO pins using jumper wires.

3. ON/OFF power supply switch.

4. A Green LED as a power ON indicator.

5. An 8-pin IC socket for PIC12F683 microcontroller.

6. Two potentiometers: one for providing Vref, and other for simulating analog input to ADC.

7. An ICSP header connector.

8. Two tactile switches for input operation.

9. A TTL to RS232 level shifter using a transistor circuit.

10. A piezo buzzer.

11. A DC motor with driving circuit.