Thomas shares makes | articles tagged "pic"

JAL Programmable Logic Controller

When my brother was doing his last year of high-school in electromechanics, he came up with the idea of doing his final project using a homebuilt PLC instead of the usual Siemens stuff. I built the electronics and came up with a framework so he could easily implement his GRAFCET state machine for his part sorting robot for the PICMICRO in the JAL programming language.

This was long before Arduino, long before 'all the cool kids were doing it', and JAL was a free compiler for the affordable PIC microcontrollers. The Arduino of its days.

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Alarm clock using a PIC microcontroller

This is an alarm clock I built. It was very effective during the sort time I used it, because I programmed it to play a very annoying tune through a speaker. I actually started to wake up before the alarm went of, so other people in the house didn't wake up from the annoying pitches it played.

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First steps with the PICmicro

In the year 2001 I became very interested in digital electronics, and wanted to start experimenting with microcontrollers. When I was about to buy (expensive) Basic Stamps, I found the JAL website, and read the Hello World material. The JAL language targeted the Microchip PIC controllers.