I was looking around the office for a PIC16F microcontroller to try out some sample code, but I couldn’t find any lying around. My colleague Richard Hayes gave me a little circuit board which is an adapter for serial to HD44780 (that’s the widely used Hitachi LCD display interface). It uses a PIC16F819 to do the conversion for serial to the LCD interface and Richard reckoned that one five-pin block of pin connections contained everything needed to program using a PICkit 2. I haven’t actually programmed it yet, but it looks like he’s right.
The adapter board has “LCD03″ written on it and although I can’t find the exact model online, it looks like it’s an older version of the LCD05 adapter shown at the bottom of this page. Whenever I’ve seen one of these LCD03 modules before it has always been attached to an LCD display, like the one shown below which I’ve just come across on my desk.
I’ll update this post once I’ve programmed the PIC, but for the time being these are the connections for the PICkit 2:
Link to editable Inkscape SVG version of connection diagram.
Once I had soldered a 5-pin header onto the LCD03 board, this is how I connected it to the PICkit 2:
To check that the connection was working, I used the PICkit 2 software application to try to read the contents of the PIC’s program memory. As shown below, although the connection was successful, the program memory could not be read because “code protect” is enabled. It remains to be seen whether the chip can still be programmed.
