PIC Trainer circuits.

I wanted a board that I could use to introduce my Year 10 GCSE Electronic Products students to the important aspects of PICs. I went on a KSD course about PICs to find out about the major offerings. I was surprised to find that there were many ‘off the shelf’ PIC systems available for this purpose. The problem was not going to be the availability of suitable systems, but choosing the most appropriate for my purposes, and then the little problem of paying for my chosen system.

Reasons for choosing the PICAXE system

Next Page > reasons for designing my own board.

Home Page>

This is the ‘standard’ board supplied by Revolution Education for building PICAXE 18 systems.

This is Revolution Education’s PICAXE ‘starter’ system. It includes everything you need to get started.

For a number of reasons I came to the conclusion that the ‘best’ choice was either “PIC Logicator” or “PICAXE”

To see for yourself, click HERE for PIC Logicator

For PICAXE click HERE.

I made the final choice based on the price of sufficient systems for a class set. The cheapest was PICAXE by a huge margin. This was largely because the software for the PICAXE system is FREE - my favourite price. In addition, PICAXE PICs are programmed on the system board itself - using a download cable from a serial port on a PC. For Logicator, and most of the other systems, a dedicated programmer unit is required. The PIC chips themselves are put into this unit to have the program downloaded, then moved to the system board for use. I wanted each student to be able to download a program onto their own board without constantly removing the PIC chip itself.