In this project you will learn how to blink an led connected to the GPIO pins of PIC16F877A microcontroller using MPLAB IDE and PICKIT programmer.

The setup requirement for this project is as given below:

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Project(PE000004) Setup Required ➤:PIC development board or Schedule project in our lab setup

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Project Content

• Required hardware and software
• Schematic diagram
• PIC16f877A GPIO description
• Building the software program, creating binaries
• Loading binaries on the microcontroller
• Project output observations, Video explanations
• Update this project completion for online courses

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Online courses related to this project

Required hardware and software

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The required hardware and software for this project is as below:

A breadboard

1 x 4mm LED

1 x resistor between 220 Ohm to 1 kOhm

Hookup cables

MPLAB IDE from Microchip

PICKIT3 Programmer, connecting cable from PICKIT3 to your computer

Development board hosting PIC16F877A Microcontroller

Power supply for the development board

A light-emitting diode (LED) is a two-lead semiconductor light source. It is a p–n junction diode that emits light when activated. When a suitable current is applied to the leads, electrons are able to recombine with electron holes within the device, releasing energy in the form of photons. Light-emitting diodes are used in applications as diverse as aviation lighting, automotive headlamps, advertising, general lighting, traffic signals, camera flashes, lighted wallpaper and medical devices.

Light emitting diode(LED) has +ve and -ve polarity. The long lead of led is +ve and short lead of led is -ve.

The resistor has no polarity. So you can connect it in any direction

I am using our company ETK01001 embedded trainer kit board for this project. You can use any PIC development board for this project. You can also schedule this project on our company hardware and execute the project remotely from anywhere.

Schematic diagram

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The schematic diagram for this project is as shown below:

PIC16f877A GPIO description

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PIC16F877A is a 8-bit microcontroller. Download the datasheet of the microcontroller here. It has total 40 pins out of which 33 pins are used for GPIO. PIC16F877A has 5 ports namely PORTA, PORTB, PORTC, PORTD, PORTE. The GPIO pins are used interfacing different input/output devices to the PIC microcontroller.

PORTA - PORTE registers in PIC16F877A microcontroller have alternate functions which means when a pin in the register is used for alternate function it cannot be used for general purpose input/output functions. This is determined by the internal register settings configured by the user program. So to use as a led control pin we need to configure the pin connected to the led as GPIO output.

GPIO Registers

Register	Register Description
TRISX	Determines whether the PORT or pin is used for input or output. If TRISX bit=1, the corresponding port pin is set as input. If TRISX bit=0, the corresponding port pin is set as output.
PORTX	The actual data that will be written on the PORT or pin.

The PORTA - PORTE registers, their pins and alternate functions are defined in the following table.

PORTA - PORTE Registers, pins, alternate functions

Register	Pins	Alternate functions
PORTA	PA0 - PA5	Analog to Digital Converter(ADC).
PORTB	PB0 - PB7	Interrupts.
PORTC	PC0 - PC7	PWM, UART, I2C.
PORTD	PD0 - PD7	Parallel slave port.
PORTE	PE0 - PE2	Analog to digital converter(ADC).

Building the software program, creating binaries

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