Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Visualizing Data – A taste of Visual C#

Our brain is wired for image processing and all things visual just reach deep in our mind faster! If there is one moment when I just cannot seem to ever get enough of a “view”, that’s when I am debugging … Continue reading

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Visualizing Data – DMCI

I guess one of the advantages of getting older (if there is any) is that I am becoming somewhat more patient and I am learning to resist the temptation of trying out on the hardware target every single line of … Continue reading

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Look Mom No … Linker Script

There are so many new features being added to MPLAB at each major (and minor) new release that I struggle to keep up. Just a couple of days ago for example, I was discussing with a colleague how it would … Continue reading

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Of Explorer 16 boards and 5V LCD displays…

I read with interest today an errata for the Explorer16 demonstration board… I know, it seems strange to think of an errata for a demonstration board, but it can happen and as in this case, there is a good lesson … Continue reading

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The Stack … so misunderstood (continued)

So we understand now what we don’t know (see The Stack … so misunderstood, part 1). We know how to set a minimum limit for the Stack size. We know how to verify how much space the linker has allocated … Continue reading

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The Stack… so misunderstood

The stack is such a key element of every C program that too often we take it for granted and we don’t spend enough time to make sure we have it set properly. Most often we resolve to look into … Continue reading

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Watching Expressions

MPLAB has become such a large application, or I should better say “group” of applications, and it keeps evolving so fast that one can hardly keep up with the pace of monthly (when it is not weekly) updates. Typically before … Continue reading

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File I/O with Static Allocation

I am sure you won’t be surprised to learn that most (if not all) of the code presented in the book is derived from my past experimentations on the PIC18 and PIC16 over a few years… In particular the FileIO … Continue reading

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The missing (pinout) table

There is one table I have been looking for many times among the PIC24 documentation and could never find… it’s a pin-out table, nothing fancy, but a complete one that would help me figure out quickly how to tell if … Continue reading

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Chapter 5 Excercises

The exercises assigned in Chapter 5 are actually quite advanced and are mostly meant to give you ideas of the kind of powerful things you can do in C using interrupts (and simple state machines). The following chapters, in particular … Continue reading

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