So we’ve been putting PICxie through it’s paces, one disappointing thing that seems to have happened is that the PIC18F26J50 that we got seems to have a bad USB transceiver! No matter what we do we can’t get the USB the respond. We have 3.3v on the VUSB pin, the oscillator signal is very clean. There is continuity between the end of the cable and the pins on the PIC. After a lot of head scratching we finally just put a project on that had only this code:

UCON = 0;
UCFG = 0;
UCFGbits.UPUEN = 1;
UCFGbits.FSEN = 1;
UCONbits.USBEN = 1;

On the prototype this causes the device to be detected, on the current assembled PICxie nothing happens. All the relevant pins are exactly the same voltage between the two, so at the point we can safely assume the PIC is at fault which isn’t common, but at least now we can order a new one and get the USB bootloader tested.

As far as the other hardware it’s all working, and we have the ICSP port so we can test everything still. We took a trip from Columbus up to Johnstown, and it was awesome to be able to log the temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, and magnetic field strength during the trip. We’re already working on a GPS module that you can place PICxie into because we’d like to make it easy to be able to correlate the data to the GPS location as well.

I apologize for the colors not being in proper order ^_^ but here is some bonus assembly PICs to make up for it.

We’ll have more PICs and hopefully a video or two up this weekend some time so stay tuned!!