ECE101 – Basic Electrical and Computer Engineering

The History

Most people don’t really thrill at the idea of writing huge amounts of code in assembly, or, if you’re normal, any amount of code in assembly. Well, this can cause some problems if you want to use a 10-17 series PIC. Basically, MPLab doesn’t support C for anything less than an 18 series PIC. Rude, eh? However, if you really need a 10-17 series PIC (such as the rfPICs) there is another option: HI-TECH C.

HI-TECH is a third party that has received the stamp of approval from Microchip as the official C compiler provider. In its free state, there are serious limitations in what kind of PICs you can use and how much of the memory on those PICs you can use. However, these limitations have not caused me any problems in my learning, hobbyish stage.

So, I know you’re thinking, “Enough, enough! How do you use it?” Since this is a high-powered environment/compiler designed for people who do this for a living, there are a lot of gadgets and features that can confuse somebody (at least me) who only wants to write a small “Hello World” program and get it on their microcontroller. Once the steps are shown to do it, they’re quite simple. I’ll show them to you.

Getting the Software

Go to the HI-TECH Demos Web-Page and scroll down to the bottom of the screen where it says Free Software. You will want to click on “HI-TECH PICC-LITE” under the operating system of your choice. The next page will require you to sign up (life nowadays, need to register to pick your nose anymore…) and then the download will begin. About four megabytes later, you will open the installer. The steps are straightforward, just make sure you select the box **HI-TIDE Integrated Development Environment

Adding the environment path is up to you. I didn’t because I’m not much of a command line guy anymore but I don’t think you’ll hurt anything either way. After this, your installer will download HI-TIDE, the environment, which is about 80 megabytes and took me about 5 minutes on my 1.5 MB DSL line.

Once everything is installed and you open Hi-Tide for the first time, you will see this screen:

Click on Workbench, which should take you here:

Now you’re ready to get down to it. Next, we’ll go through the microcontroller’s version of “Hello World” as I show how to create a project, write some code, and put it on your PIC processor using a 16F690 as an example.

Any feedback about this post, either in regards to content, grammar, or style, would be most welcome. I will most likely change this post multiple times until I like it. Please either leave a comment or e-mail me and let me know what you think.