Showing posts with label PIC18F25K50. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PIC18F25K50. Show all posts

Sunday, January 20, 2013

USB RS-485 Adapter Through Hole PCBs Revisited

The second batch of through hole PCBs arrived recently.  I had fixed errors in the original design, moved some components around, corrected the silkscreen, and added silkscreen labels.  The design was uploaded to China, services paid for, and twelve PCBs were handed to me by the postal worker about four weeks later.

The worst offence of the original design was necessary green wire jumps and cuts rework for the Vcc and Vusb lines.  This new board doesn't require any rework.  I built up two boards and one works, and unfortunately I snipped a power line on the second board while trimming leads on a capacitor and some green wire solved the problem (oops, but good save!).

The silkscreen labels are a bit too small to see with my eyes, but make the board more usable.  I moved the JITE socket out so it hangs off the board with the benefit of the board also fitting screw terminals like those used in my (mostly) surface mount USB RS-485 Adapter board.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

PIC18F2XK50 brings $3 savings

These RS-485 Adapters were originally designed using PIC18F2455 (24k flash) and PIC18F2550 (32k flash) in mind, but with the recent introduction of the PIC18F24K50 (16k flash) and PIC18F25K50 (32k flash) some serious cost savings will be achieved. 

These new CPUs are pin compatible with the existing chips, almost $2 (US) cheaper, and have internal oscillators factory tuned to be accurate enough for USB full speed operation.  This eliminates the need for an external crystal circuit including two associated capacitors bringing more than $1 (US) cost savings.

The Microchip Libraries of Applications v2012-08-22 (USB stack), MPLAB IDE v8.87, and MPLAB C compiler for PIC18 MCUs v3.43 support these new chips.  I was able to successfully port my existing code using the new stack, and compile and program the chips using MPLAB.

Thanks to Dangerous Prototypes for bringing the news of these new MCUs to my attention.  And to Microchip for providing samples so quickly.  Some stock of these 5V SPDIP chips is currently available directly from Microchip and more supply will be available in the coming months.