So where did I get to last time?

Since I've been woken up by some nice council people doing road works outside my house, I'll continue forward...  But first I really need to remember where I got to when I last tried to learn to program these microchips...

I used the PIC18F2455 chip as it was the cheapest of all the chips that I wanted to use, (I initally started using the 16F 40 pin chip I had, however I'm going to stick with the 18F2455 for my reproductions).  This chip has 28 pins, and a flash program memory of 24K, (12288 single word instructions according to the spec which should be plenty for any initial programs).

In my last set of programming I had included an LCD 16x2 display panel, a slider potentiometer and a few LED's to show that the processor was working.  I also attempted to connect the USB, however never actually managed to get the USB connection to work.

Lets start with a picture of the circuit.  The program I created just displays my name on the top line of the LCD, with a display showing the position of the slider, 0->255 as well as 0000 to FF80...

I guess one useful thing would be to try and create an electronics diagram to show the full circuit used above.  While it's probably not understandable at the moment, it would actually be useful to record what the circuit is currently meant to be!

Of course, I could try to draw the circuit on a piece of paper with that old technology called a pen, however ideally I want to try and find a nice free circuit diagram maker online.

Some initial Google searching pointed out a few sites which may be of use, but nothing that looks particularly free to use.  One site seems to say that OrCAD Capture is "Pretty much an industry standard for circuit schematics"... Unfortunately it also looks a tad expensive, not that I can actually find any information on how much it would cost.

One board post pointed out an open source GPL appication called KiCAD, despite a number of french words on the site leading me to wonder if I'm going to end up with a french language software, it does actually look like it might be what I want, so I'll give it a try...  And so I downloaded the "KiCad-2010-05-05-BZR2356-final-WinXP_full_with_components_doc_autoinstall.exe" file from the FTP site linked to KiCAD.

I'll have a play with this software, then continue writing...