A Crummy Commercial

I saw an email on the Piclist that Microchip Technology (the PIC people) have made the full XC compilers including the optimization stuff (whatever that is) free for the downloading.  It used to be that the unoptimizing compiler was available as a part of MPLAB.  Here is the press release: https://ir.microchip.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1403/microchip-expands-developer-access-with-free-mplab-xc-compilers-and-mplab-machine-learning-development-suite I've made many attempts to learn programming beyond PIC assembly language but never made much progress.  Theoretically it should increase productivity but I dunno - I'm just not that great at programming.  It sounds like a lot of folks are becoming, in effect: "systems analysts". they don't write code, they spec what they want the code to do.  Then the AI generates the code.  The person then reviews, tests and tweaks the input to AI for any necessary changes.  I can't see doing that either, especi...

This was a weird video: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxUEOdC4VzU The weirdest thing to me is that data centers are rated by the power they use in gigawatts !  Here is a snip from a EE Times story about an OpenAI and AMD deal: . Lisa Su of AMD and Sam Altman of OpenAI A gigawatt is 1,000,000,000 watts or 1000 megawatts (nuclear power plants like Point Beach in Wisconsin are a pair of 625 megawatt plants). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Beach_Nuclear_Plant Maybe it's the QRPer in me, but why would anyone rate an AI Data Center by power rather than gigaflops or whatever the actual computing benchmarks are for AI, tokens ?  what are those ?  After viewing that video this Wisconsin data center seems sketchy to me: https://constructionreviewonline.com/openai-oracle-and-vantage-to-build-15b-lighthouse-data-center-campus-in-wisconsin/ It reminds me of this: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/03/foxconn.html They knocked down some houses, did a lot of land grad...

I have resisted the install of development software on this Lenovo Ideapad.  It is an underpowered machine so I figured that I could always run those kind of programs on my other computers (Windows 10).  But I guess I've gotten familiar with this Windows 11 machine, the older ones seem a little "off" - especially the keyboards. So I decided to resurrect at least my old PIC "Burn and Crash" setup: the PIC development icons on the squiggly road desktop of this Lenovo Ideapad The idea is to use several programs to edit, assemble and program PIC microcontrollers.  The user "burns" a microcontroller chip with code and then plugs that chip into a circuit to see how it "crashes".  Then the cycle is repeated. The editor is either Notepad or Write, the simple text editors built into Windows.   The assembler is MPASMX: https://www.microchip.com/en-us/tools-resources/develop/mplab-x-ide  To save from downloading a buncha stuff I wouldn't use I just ...

I mentioned code for PICs recently: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-code.html  Today I received an inquiry about the Norcal keyer chip: the PIC12F629-I/P is programmed by me to become the Norcal Keyer chip http://wb9kzy.com/norcal.htm  The ham then mentioned that he had built a home brew version of the Norcal Keyer kit for a beacon project but it didn't work.  He didn't realize that the PIC chip he had purchased was blank and wouldn't do anything until it was programmed.  So he just wanted to check that I still sell the chip.   When I heard this I offered to program the chip he had bought at no charge other than the normal  shipping fee (now $5 in 2025).  I can see where a customer might not want the hassle of packing up and sending the chip to me for programming but I thought I'd offer. I'll put something on the web site about this later but I also offer this service to customers in general:  if you would like me to program YOUR chip...

Martin Clausen created a PIC programmer back when I first started using PIC microcontrollers around the turn of the 21st century: https://web.archive.org/web/20051226170059/http://www.rotgradpsi.de/mc/picprog/picproge.html The programmer hardware was driven by a PC parallel port, remember those ?  It was a command line DOS program that could be invoked in a batch file.  I used it with my late, lamented Sharp laptop.  It was a perfect way for me to develop PIC code.  Note that this was still the bad old days of EPROM PICs so I had my trusty Walling EPROM eraser right next to my keyboard.  Crash and Burn development ?  More like Erase, Burn and then crash ! But then the Sharp met an untimely death due to a bad hard drive.  I moved on to a Thinkpad and Windows.  The PIC programmer was a PICkit which could handle the newer parts like PIC12F683 which was used for the PK-4 keyer chip.  I depopulated the Clausen Picprog: and then in 2003, built a di...

 When I first started selling kits I used the Motorola MC68hc705j1a, a 20 pin EPROM based microcontroller. see: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/before-flash-there-was-eprom-that.html Motorola would usually promote their new chips with an offer.  For the MC68hc705c8 they had a programmer and a course that sold for something like $68.  Then if you took a test (and passed it) they'd refund your money.  They also had courses for the 68HC16 which which included an intro to DSP.  When the j1a chip came out I was able to build my own programmer.  Later I bought a boatload of j1a chips for 33 cents each, the only problem was that the seller had ground off the part number !   I really liked the Motorola chips, the assembly language was easy to use with few gotchas.  But that's not to say there weren't problems.  For example Motorola had an EEPROM based chip, the 68HC805 but they were unobtainium.  And the EPROM based J1a was VERY hard to obta...

The computer does EXACTLY what I tell it to do (at least with PIC microcontrollers).  The problem is that what I tell it to do is often flawed logically, in other words  the computer does what I tell it to do, not what I want it to do. This happened with the LCD Metronome period timer: a period of 1.1767 Sec I just couldn't get it to work and then it finally dawned on me what the problem was.  Most LCD alphanumeric displays use a Hitachi chip known as the HD44780 (or a clone).  To save pins the data and commands are written to the 44780 chip in 4 bit blocks (4 bit nybbles versus 8 bit bytes, get it ?).  Although I had been writing the characters in two nybbles, with the control data I had only written 1 nybble so the display was jumbled.  An easy fix once I realized what was happening.   Not much of a blog post but sometimes I get frustrated. There are times when after clanging my head against the wall a sudden inspiration comes and the problem gets fi...