LCD will not start

[JohnPaul]

ski,

I like your 'heartbeat' practice. I would adapt it as my practice too.

Regards,
JohnPaul

[skimask]

ski,

I like your 'heartbeat' practice. I would adapt it as my practice too.

Regards,
JohnPaul

Put a voltmeter on the OSCx pins. You should get around 2.5v with an external oscillator, or if you've got OSC2 setup as an Fosc/4 output.
I wouldn't think you smoked a chip...as has been noted before, PICs are fairly tough chips, not unbreakable, but tough.
And if for some reason, your PIC is running on the 48khz internal clock, your program will run about 83 times slower than it should...in other words it'll take 166 seconds for your LEDs to blink.

[JohnPaul]

Ski,

Hmm. I am not yet familiar with the OSC parameter settings.
I did the LED test without any of the additional DEFINE and @ statements beside the ones that I posted.
I waited 5-10 minutes for the LED to light up on pin 6. But the chip and bottom of the bread board were getting hot so I pulled the power off.


I just checked again. I think that I might have really burned my chip this time.
I placed the voltmeter on 0 and +5V, and I would read +5v. But the moment I connect my +5v cable to VDD (pin 14). The voltmeter reading would drop to 1.67v?


Regards,
JohnPaul

[skimask]

Ok, get rid of everything but the power supply (connect a light bulb across it, verify 5v under a small load, use 3 alkalines or 4 NiCads instead of a power supply), the PIC16F627A, an LED with a 300-ish ohm resistor in series, 10K pullup to +5v on MCLR, and some sort of crystal/oscillator setup on OSC1... and put a small cap across Vdd and Vss on the PIC (very important step here!)

Double check your pin 1 on the PIC and plug it in.
Break it down...break it WAY down to bare bones.

Rewrite the program, simplify it as far as you can, one LED or a group of LEDs, doesn't matter, same thing, blink the LED...

Let us know what you've got after you get it broke down...

I don't think you've fried anything (although it's entirely possible), I think you're just forgetting something basic, and when that gets figured out, everything else will fall into place faster than you can spend money on it

[JohnPaul]

Dear Ski,

Hahaha... Blinking the LED is the first project in the book and I thought it's so simple so I read all the projects but did not tried any of the LEDs .... skipped all the project all the way to the LCDs. Now, I am back... to LED1.BAS

I will get a new chip and tried the LED Blinking tomorrow and start anew.
It's late now.

Thank you very much! I greatly appreciate your help.

Regards,
JohnPaul

[skimask]

Dear Ski,
Hahaha... Blinking the LED is the first project in the book and I thought it's so simple so I read all the projects but did not tried any of the LEDs .... skipped all the project all the way to the LCDs. Now, I am back... to LED1.BAS
I will get a new chip and tried the LED Blinking tomorrow and start anew.
It's late now.
Thank you very much! I greatly appreciate your help.
Regards,
JohnPaul

Excellent plan! There's a reason why all these books and websites have Blink.Bas as their first project.
Once you get that working, you change the blink rate by changing the program, you add a couple of buttons which when pressed will change the blink rate depending on the button press......and it just goes up from there....then you get to spend money buying up neat stuff to play with....which is when the wife starts to disown you and you start to go broke and ...........
Never mind...
Enjoy