PIC EXPERIMENTS LAB BOOK WITH PIC16F877A AND XC8

This book is intended for use as a fast-paced laboratory guide for practical experimental work using Microchip® PIC microcontrollers. In order for people (students, hobbyists, enthusiasts, etc) to understand the inner workings of processors and embedded systems they need to be familiar with a real microcontroller. I needed to teach a course in mechatronics of which embedded systems is a part, and I needed a lab book that used one processor, one free programming language (e.g. XC8) (not a mixture of C and assembler), and one that did not have theoretical burden; a pure experiments book. I found none that satisfied all these requirements (although there are a lot of example experiments all over the internet). So, I decided to make one book, as a single resource that can enable one to start from the beginning and move up to a fairly advanced level of working with microcontrollers. It is assumed that the reader has a knowledge of basic electrical circuits or basic electronics.This book is a collection of experiments using a single mid-range microcontroller from Microchip® - the PIC16F877A. The language used is XC8, free from Microchip®, and there is no theoretical burden. The programming environment used is MPLAB, also free from Microchip®. The book is intended for use in companion with a theoretical reading/course on embedded systems (or similar), along with the PIC16F87XA datasheet, which should be used as a reference guide. With the datasheet of any other processor different from the PIC16F877A the book can also be used with that PIC microcontroller. All one needs to do is to look for the similar pinouts and ports in the datasheet of the other microcontroller and follow the examples in this lab book. So, the knowledge gained here can be applied to other PIC microcontrollers with a little more effort. Future editions will include more experiments.