DB038 a PIC experiments board

The DB038 combines an USB PIC programmer (Pickit2 compatible) with a target PIC chip (16F887) and bunch of peripherals (LEDs, displays, keypad, sensors, etc). This combination makes it an ideal all-in-one board for a PIC course.

The DB038 is a PIC experiments board. lt combines a PICkit2-compatible USB programmer and a PIC 16F887 target microcontroller (the user can substitute a pin-compatible 40-pins chip) with a wide selection of on-board peripherals and a range of connectors for external peripherals.

The board (except for the motor drivers) can be powered from a USB interface, so one cable to a Windows PC! is all you need to get going. This is the ideal board for a PIC programming introduction course.

The DB038 circuit is rather complex, so it is discussed piece by piece. The full diagrams can be found in the section Circuit diagrams (P 69). Part of this complexity is caused by the fact that the 40-pins PIC chip does not have enough pins to dedicate separate pins to each peripheral, so only the peripherals that need dedicated PIC pins are connected directly. Other peripherals are interfaced via three CD4051 analog multiplexer chips.

Multiplexing is common in real-world applications because the housing (number of pins) of a microcontroller is one of the important factors that determine its price. The DB038 board has much more peripherals than most real-world products; hence it needs a lot of multiplexing.