My difficulties with PIC's usually involve connectivity and electrical issues rather than program development so please bear with me on my various inquiries in that regard.
In the past I have received very useful insights from two participants in particular on the MicroChip website in the name of John Powers and Richard Collett who in my esteem are "Godlike." Gentlemen like Richard and John have the applied knowledge that simple experimenters like myself need to get off square one. I am always grateful for help of this kind.
I have tried without much success to control slave PIC's from a master. I have never been able to determine why they seem to refuse to work together the way I expected. I thought putting decoupling caps across the power traces would solve the problem but it did not. I regret that I can't at this moment relate the exact symptoms since it was a while ago that I attempted breadboarding some design scheme I had.
I have a few questions however that my get me going in the right direction again:
Will more than one PIC in a circuit interfere with the other's operation either through the traces or via EMF?
If I were to use a PIC as a master to send a digital output to the pin of a slave, is it advantageous (or imperative) to have both of them running off of the same clock signal? How about a master outputting to 2 slaves?
Is there an electrical limit to how many PIC's can be clocked together, or for that matter co-exist on the same power bus? This assuming the bus is correctly sized for adequate capacity.
Is a simple crystal oscillator package capable of providing clocking for more than one PIC on a clock bus, or does a more complex clock module of some design need to be introduced?
You may wonder what I'm trying to do, but I can imagine a master with slave modules having another PIC at it's core, and then being able to add identical modules for future expansion. I have been using "PIC" to imply that individual units may not all be the same part number.
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