dsPIC Serial Communicator

About dsPIC Serial Communicator

dsPIC Serial Communicator was the first practical program that I wrote. I used the wxWidgets toolkit for the GUI and the program was written in C++. I wrote the program because I needed a way to send data back and fourth between a PC and PIC microcontroller. The program worked wonderfully. I used it to test motors on my dsPIC Square Bot, to display the state of digital inputs, and to display and graph the values of analog inputs.

Development on this program has been discontinued for the time being. I have switched from using wxWidgets to a much better toolkit (in my opinion), called Qt. Sometime I will port the program over to Qt and make it much more flexible, allowing it to be used for many different types of microcontrollers and adding a configuration screen giving the user the ability to choose the number of digital, analog, and custom inputs that will be received, and allowing them to customize the data being sent as well. The serial protocol used in this program is also not very good, now that I look back at it, so I need to rewrite that too.

Introduction to dsPIC Serial Communicator

dsPIC Serial Communicator is designed for communication with a microcontroller through an RS-232 connection. This program can send and recieve data using a serial port on Windows.

Features:

Send/Recieve
  • Recieves four two-byte User Variables, uv1 .. uv4
  • Recieves four two-byte Analog Input Values, an1 .. an4
  • Recieves four one-byte Digital Input Values, dig1 .. dig4
  • Sends three PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) values for motor & servo control
Displaying Data
  • User Variables & Analog Input Values are displayed in non-editable text fields (allowing for copy operations)
  • User Variable names are editable in text fields
  • User Variable & Analog Input values can be graphed
  • Digital Input Values are displayed using Green (ON) and Red (OFF) bitmaps for easy recognition
Saving Data
  • All data - User Variables, Analog Values, Digital Values - can be exported to a CSV file
  • CSV (Comma Seperated Values) files can easily be imported into Excel for reviewing or creating graphs
  • The names you specify for your User Variables will be the column names for the respective User Variables

Although the software is not currently supported, if you're curious to see what it looks like you can still download it by clicking here.