Actually, the project we referred to above wasn’t all that long ago – February 1999 to be precise (it just seems long ago!). LED FUN was based on a PIC12C508 which was programmed to flash LEDs in a variety of patterns.

The board was designed and produced in Australia by Labtronics. Now reincarnated as eLabtronics, the new project, PICFun2, is based on a more powerful PIC, the 16F84.

In its most basic form, there isn't much to PICFun2 - apart from the PIC chip itself there is just an input from your PC (the D9 connector), power supply and some output LEDs. But this is only the starting point. PICFun2 can be expanded to do a lot more than flash LEDs!

PICFun2 has more than one aim. In its "bare bones" form, it's basically just a PIC on a PC board with a sprinkling of components to enable you to connect it to the outside world (or, more correctly, the inside world – the inside of your personal computer!).

It’s designed as an educational aid, something for (especially) school students (or anyone else) to "cut their teeth" on in the world of microcontrollers. Indeed, the manual supplied (on an accompanying CD-ROM) goes into a great deal of explanation into just what a microcontroller is and what it does, long before you get to touch a soldering iron! There’s even a trial version of some software to help you program – but more on this shortly.

But it’s much more than this. The project software provided on the CD-ROM shows just a couple of things you can do with PICs. Once you've learned how to drive them, you’re ready to start writing your own code to do, well, whatever you want to.

Why would you want to learn about microcontrollers, and PICs in particular? Well, they're in such common use today that an understanding of them is almost essential for anyone interested in furthering their electronics knowledge, whether that be at a hobby, student, technician or professional level.

When we say common, we mean it. Unless you’ve just woken up, the chances are that already today you’ve used not just one, but several devices containing PICs or other microcon-trollers. In fact, if you woke up to an electronic alarm clock or clock radio, it probably contained one!

There are many different types of PICs (and other microcontrollers). Some, such as the type we are using here, can be programmed and erased hundreds, often thousands of times. Others, such as the ones used in commercial equipment, can be programmed (or "written to") only once. Their program cannot be erased – to change the program, you have to change the chip. These are much cheaper to produce than the re-programmable type and are used when all of the code has been tested or "debugged", ready for a production run.

If you want to know more about PICs and microcontrollers, there is a lot more in the PICFun manual on the CD-ROM – a lot more!