PIC development boards by Microchip find a wide range of applications in small production runs, development, training and education, application prototyping. One such widely used development board is the PICkit™ 2 44-Pin Demo Board.
PICkit™ 2 44-Pin Demo Board is a small demo board from Microchip with a PIC16F887 microcontroller unit, eight LEDs, push button and potentiometer. The Display system formed by the eight LEDs, Prototyping area (Surface mount type) available on the board and the non-availability of on-board power supply are the major limitations of the 44-pin Demo board.
In this thesis, an enhanced development environment for the demo board is developed. It consists of a Graphic Liquid Crystal Display module, On-board power supply and a Rectangular connector to provide easy access to all the I/O signals of the MCU.
The system is designed using discrete components and is laid out on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to keep the design compact. Two tutorials are developed to test the Graphic LCD module. The first tutorial displays alphanumeric characters and the second tutorial displays graphics. On-board power supply is provided by a 9V battery incorporated on the daughter PCB. The I/O signals of the PIC are connected to the 40-pin rectangular connector on the daughter board, to provide easy access to the signals and a simple prototyping area provided by a bread board.
Thus the 44-pin Demo board when coupled with the daughter board designed as part of this thesis provides an enhanced development environment for applications using the PICkit 2 Debug Express from Microchip.