First Steps

I want to build some kind of spherical robot and the brain I've chosen for the robot it was a microcontroller from Microchip. Perhaps later I'll tell you why I preferred it.

PIC32 is the newest and the most powerful microcontroller family from Microchip. And the PIC32 USB Starter Board was the perfect candidate for version 1.0 of the robot's brain. I've bought the development board because it was an already tested environment and practically free of hardware bugs, we all know what trouble can bring a simple misplaced wire…

The PIC32MX USB Starter Board is designed with a permanently mounted (i.e., soldered) PIC32MX460F512L processor. And at the moment I think is the Big Kahuna in the PIC32 USB family.

The Dev board is quite nice and eye catching, although it has only 3 LEDs, 3 switches and a USB On-The-Go embedded host. But for me it’s perfect, because is small enough to fit in my robot along with an adaptor. The board has quite an annoying expansion HIROSE connector that is not too easy to find and just to be on the safe side I've bought the adapter also from Microchip. Since there will be a lot of testing the expansion board is must, or you can get out and spend all the money on chocolate and pizzas.

Ok, so we have the equipments and we can go to work. Oh, oh, oh, hold your horses dear friends. Is not that easy and I wonder why it isn't  :(

First I was very upset not to see in the dev board package a CD with useful software and examples. It was just a red paper with the following message: go to www.microchip.com/PIC32USBboard

Call me obsolete, but always a hard copy can be useful. I'll tell you later how to make these things a little bit sweeter.


I thought that in a matter of days I can master the PIC32 and I can effectively concentrate on my application. Simple as save the cheerleader, save the world, any HEROES fans here? It wasn’t the case here and for somebody with practically zero knowledge of microcontrollers (like me) the task is quite challenging.

That’s why I want to write a little tutorial about programming PIC32 from a Beginner to a Beginner. In this way the things will be clearer for me and who knows maybe somebody else will benefit from this info I've gathered.

Just stay close!