We’ve been living a life of luxury, writing our microcontroller
code in a text editor and using — of all things — a compiler to
turn it into something the chip can use. [Dan Amlund Thomsen]
shows us a different way of doing things. He’s actually crafting
the operation codes for a PIC microcontroller by hand. We’re
glad he’s explained this in-depth because right now we feel way
over our heads. His program is pretty simple, it blinks a single
LED and he’s chosen t work with a PIC 12F1840. The first order
of business is to issues the words that configure the chip using
14-bit binary values from the datasheet. From there he goes on
to write the program in assembly code. At this point he could
pretty much just run this through the assembler, but he’s really
just getting started now. He walks through the format necessary
to package the configuration words, then goes on to illustrate
the translation of assembly commands to binary op codes. We’re
not sure we’ll ever get around to trying this ourselves, but it
was cer