PICyStiX

One of the first things I HATE about bread boarding is the setup nightmare.  How many times must I wire up a power LED, reset circuit, ISCP, xtal, and it goes on and on.  My first task is to design a PIC carrier similar to what this individual did.  Thanks to China, we all now have inexpensive board manufacturing at our disposal and I am about to take full advantage of it.  My only constraint is that I am cheap (really, ask my wife).   Iteadstudio will make 10 5cm X 5cm  PCB's for $10.  Who can beat that!  With a little mind optimization, I was able to design a PIC carrier card in 2.5cm X 5cm.  Great!  Now I can cut the PCB in half and get twice the number of PICyStiX.

It only took about 12 days to from order to mail man at my door step.  I was like a kid at Christmas opening the heavily packing taped package from China.  After I gnawed, sawed, ripped and cut the package opened, I ran to the garage, scored the board with a box knife, snapped a couple in half and started soldering.  Wow, was I excited to get going!  30 minutes later, I had 4 PICyStiX in hand and was off to my eagerly awaiting bread board. My only issue was that I was out of the correct size of momentary switches.  Luckily, I had a handful that would fit, if ever so snugly.

<insert failing warp drive sound> Oh no!  I forgot to pour the ground plane before I sent off the board.  Back to the garage to start soldering in 7 jumper wires (it could have been worse).

Engines online!  After an hour of tedious soldering, my four PICyStiX were ready to be retested.  This time they worked.

I have since populated, fixed and tested 8 boards.

• 2 PIC16C84
• 2 PIC16F628
• 2 PIC16F54
• 2 PIC16F88

In the end, the worst thing I discovered is that the new PIC16F parts actually have three additional I/O pins (RA5,RA6, and RA7), that I did not run to the headers.  On the better side of the coin, I have some very handy modules to use and a couple fantastic lessons learned.

I have already started on version 2.0 that will bring all 16 IO pins to headers (Vcc and Vss too).  If you are interested in the schematic and gerber files, just post a note below.