Very, very basic electronics

Tiger-Tim

New Member
Hello everyone I am a complete novice to picaxe and similar things. Any help would be really appreciated. I recently bought a PICAXE-14 Project Board and am looking forward to experimenting. My main interest is controlling things in model railways or model boats, so it would be switching leds off and on or using servos to turn guns or operate points (turnouts) or semaphore signals on railways. The circuits I envisage would be relatively simple as would the programming.
My question is this. Is it possible to programme the 08M2 chip on this board?. Following on from this, is it possible to programme a smaller chip in one of the larger board such as say the PICAXE-28X2 Shield Base? Any help or advice gratefully received.
 

westaust55

Moderator
For the first part of your question,
Welcome to the PICAXE forum

As long as you have the minimum circuit as shown in PICAXE manual 1 which has the two resistors (22 kOhm and 10 kOhm) for the SerialIn line and a 3-pin connector or stereo socket wired to Serial in circuit, the SerialOut pin and ground you can program the PICAXE chip on your own board.

If the board was designed for a 14M then the 8, 14 and 20 pin parts all have the same 4 "top-end" pins (near the end with pin 1 ) for power supply and programming so any one of the three PICAXE parts can be programmed in the same socket - even if a few pins hung over the end of the socket.


For the second part:
Generally NO.
The 18 pin chips have the programming pins mid chip..
The 28 and 40 pin chips also have their programming pins mid chip.
So you found not program other M or M2 parts without having some for of adapter and "jury rig" connections.


Further, if you do any development work on a breadboard, consider to buying or making an AXE029 breadboard adapter.
Although the jumper and labelling suggest it is primarily for the 28 and 40 pin devices, having the required 2 resistors and a stereo plug (suitable for connection of the AXE027 cable) once plugged into the breadboard it saves you having to set up the resistors each time and is easily connected with wired to the actual 8/14/18/20 pin PICAXE chips.

Note that trying to plug the standard stereo plug into a breadboard does not work well as the connectors are too short to achieve good contact. There are ways around that and the AXE029 is one of them.
 
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lbenson

Senior Member
Regarding your model warship interest, people from this "North Texas Big Gun" forum at one time frequented the picaxe forum: http://ntxbg.org/nabgo/

Lots of information under Resources, Construction Articles.

There have been many model railway posts on the forum.
 

AllyCat

Senior Member
Hi,

Unless your computer has a COM port (not very common these days) then you do need a USB programming adapter. The AXE027 is strongly recommended; a little expensive but only one is needed and there can be "complications" with alternative adapters, which may trouble a novice.

Similarly, I always recommend building the "programming interface" (only two resistors and some form of connector) onto every board. It not only avoids the need to move the PICaxe chips between boards, but it can be extremely useful when developing and debugging the programs.

The compatible (programming) pin connections on the 08, 14 and 20 pin M2s does make it very easy to develop similar PCBs and software, with an appropriate number of pin connections for each application.

Cheers, Alan.
 
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