This is (not) rocket science

December 15, 2018

“How a New Generation of Core Independent Peripherals Redefined Embedded Control”

This is (not) Rocket Science is a book about the PIC Microcontroller series.

Many modern microcontrollers have hardware blocks for communications, timing, analogue to digital conversion, capacitive sensing etc. These are typically configurable in code and can be hooked up to the different pins of the microcontroller.

The PICs take this one step further and make these modules available outside the control of the processing core. This allows these modules to be wired together and run independently of the code. You might want to do that to generate signals for another part of the system or to preprocess signals coming into the core. It’s not as flexible as FPGA but the blocks are bigger so you can build with much less effort.

This is (not) rocket science takes each of these modules and looks at how it is configured and used. There’s a handy chart at the end of the book explaining which devices contain which blocks.

The book reads more like a reference book or data sheet than a tutorial but there are examples and clear explanations. I’ve not used the PIC series for quite some years due to the need for a separate programmer and a poor experience with my last PIC project. The modern devices look great and Lucio certainly sells their benefits. Given the ease of use of Arduino and Micropython boards I’m unlikely to swap back to PIC in the near future, but if I did, I’d definately be referring back to  This is (not) Rocket Science

By Andy from Workshopshed Add Comment

  Posted in: Books and Magazine Reviews Tags: Microchip, PIC