Total Newbie...

[Frozen001]

Hi all I am totally new to programing Pics, and I am looking for some good tutorials.

I currently am using Microchips PIC18 explored board, along with PICBasic Pro. The Pic is an 18F8722.

Right now I have gott two pieces of code to work, I can blink an LED, and I can turn an LED on and off when I press a button... sounds simple, but like I said I am totally new.

What I want to do next is to have the 8 on board leds display the status of 8 bits, but I am totally lost on how to do this...

Any help would be great!

Thanks,

Lou

[mackrackit]

Welcome to the forum.

This example might do the trick
http://www.microengineeringlabs.com/...pbc/countx.bas

[Frozen001]

Thanks...

I actually got it working before I read this... Had to set the Port as Outputs...

Now my next question:

The PIC18 explored poard has an LCD display on it. It is connected through an SPI I/O expander, MCP23S17. How do in therface it??? Microchips Manual is totally useless for me since I have no programming background...

The user guide states this:

An LCD display with two lines, 16 characters each, is connected to the SPI I/O
expander, MCP23S17. The two control lines and eight data lines are connected to the
I/O expander.
The I/O expander has an SPI interface that connects it to the microcontroller.The I/O
expander is disabled or enabled from the SPI by jumper JP3.

[mackrackit]

Not familiar with that board. Do you have a link to the docs?

[Frozen001]

Not familiar with that board. Do you have a link to the docs?

http://www.microchip.com/stellent/id...cName=en535770

[skimask]

Well, hate to give you a bit of bad news, but you can't drive that LCD directly using PicBasicPro (maybe you already knew that, maybe not...)
It's set up such that the I/O from the expander drive the LCD pins. The LCD is a standard parallel, Hitachi 44780 compatible type from the looks of it.
If you do a Google search on that term, you should be able to find some documentation on how to drive it. I don't have anything with me at the moment or I'd attach it here.
Once you get your head wrapped around driving that LCD thru the I/O expander, it should be a piece of cake.
Since the board is from Microchip, I can't imagine somebody NOT having already written some 'libraries' to handle that.