Hey, I am Wayne Freeman. You’re in the board room. We are here in the board room with Mark McComb today. Mark is the designer of our latest 8 bit development kit. It is called the PICDEM lab development kit. And I’ve invited him over to kind of give us a little bit of an idea of what features are in the kit and what is included in it. Mark it is really good to have you here. Thanks for coming.

My pleasure.

So Mark you are an applications engineer but your specialty is training customers on new products and new technologies that come out of microchip so this kit is some kind of a departure for you.

Yeah.

Can you tell us what your motivation was to creating the kit.

Well the idea behind the board was to give the user complete access to all the pins on the microcontroller populating the board. Typically when a board is manufactured it is typically for it to be specific for a task such as controlling an LCD or a motor. What we have done here is to allow the user to have complete access to all the pins and they can use any pin on the microcontroller in any way they see fit that will suit their application.

Can you quickly discuss some of the highlights of the board we have here in front of us.

Absolutely. It’s basically what you get in the box when you open it up when you order this kit, you are gonna get the PICDEM lab development board itself, you are also gonna get a PICDEM2 programmer debugger along with its usb cable, you are also gonna get some series of components such as resistors, some leds, you are gonna get some mosfets, some jumper cables, some jumper wires rather that you are gonna be able to use to complete the labs that are included in the PICDEM lab user guide. Now if we take a closer look at the board itself, you can see that the board actually features 3 sockets and this allows us to use any of our 8 to 20 pin mid range PIC controllers and we even have a socket here for small base link microcontroller in an 8 pin package.

So this can actually support all flash microcontrollers that are less than 20 pins but it comes with 5 different microcontrollers.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You also notice that each socket has its own dedicated ICSP connectors so that the PICDEM programmer debugger that is included in the kit can individually program the microcontroller populating the board. We also have an on board voltage regulator that can regulate voltages to the micros from 1.3 to 5.2 volts off a 9 volt battery or off a 9 volt DC supply.

That’s really good for battery powered applications.

Absolutely. You can even disconnect the jumpers on the 9 volt battery so if you want to do something like a battery charging application then that’s easy to do. Now the subtle prototyping area along with the kit of components can be used for developing a wide range of applications. Other features include dual voltage supply rails on either sides of the prototyping area and some mounted components such as the speaker and 32Khz oscillator. And all these components are wired to their own expansion headers so that if you want to use the components you simply connect each to the desired microcontroller pin using one of the jumper wires provided in the kit. So that’s basically it.

So, it has a ton of components. Can you tell me who will find this kit most useful.

Anyone will find this useful. However we are marketing it towards three markets. Educators, students and anyone who is starting with a PIC microcontroller.

So you also mentioned that there is also a CD included with the kit.

Yup.

Can you tell us what is in the CD.

Absolutely. What you are gonna get in a CD is first of all a user’s guide to the PICDEM lab development board itself. That’s gonna detail certain characteristics of the board such as what the jumpers do and so on. But more importantly there is going to be a series of 13 labs in which the user can use the free high tech pixie light environment.

Wow. What are the really really cool things about this kit. Is it the fact that you have entered the flow code into some of the labs.

Flow code is a very easy to use environment in which the user actually programs a firmware using a visual programmer using flowcharts as opposed to using such languages as assembly or C, And using a variety of icons you can drag and drop these into the flow charts to do certain things as do decisions, do a while loop, do a delay etc.

So, that is gonna be really useful to the beginner.

Absolutely.

And these flow code labs are available on the web not necessarily on the CDs.

Right. When the user gets a CD they are going to have a CD with high tech C compiler labs on there, but if they go the PICDEM lab website there are a number of user guides available and one of which is specifically towards flow code.

So this board has got a ton of features, it has got the PICDEM 2 programmer debugger, all the included material for your labs, the best thing about it is the price. Can you tell the audience what this board will retail for?

Absolutely. The board is going to be up for $124.99, however educators, students are going to get significant discount through our academic program.

So are there any future expansion plans for this kit.

Absolutely, the whole idea behind this board was to have other kits developed, other user guides that would be up on the web available for download for free. And they will range from simple motor control labs to switch mode power supplies and beyond.

And this kit is going to be available at microchipdirect.com as well as several microchip distributors. So to summarize, PICDEM lab development kit supports all of microchip flash microcontrollers with 20 pins or less. It offers the users complete access to the pins that are on the microcontroller. And it comes with 13 labs with many more lab manuals in development. I mean this is a great value here and only for 124.99$. That’s all the time we have today folks. And thank you for watching this video. Mark, thank you for showing in at the boardroom.