2. Preparations

First, I decided that I need some basic equipment, and electronics components.

I have investigated every possible aspect of the project and by that knowledge I decided to buy electronics components.

A major choice was to work with the PIC16F628A microcontroller from Microchip - I decided that by information I got from EPE Magazine and later on by doing my own research through the Internet.

It turned out that this microcontroller is very easy to use (ahmmmm....), have the necessary IO ports and facilities I needed for my project (Such as USART for communicating with the PC's serial port), it is very cheap and very popular so there must be a lot of information I can dig in the Internet when torubles arrive.

Things are not so simple though - you need to write your microcontroller program into the chip itself, right? You do that by using some kind of a device called 'Programmer', which I didn't have.

I found a cheap controller that is based on the PIC16F628A chip and can be used as a programmer, so I decided to buy it - Here it is: PIC16F628 Controller. It cost less than $20, much less than a PIC programmer (although there are advantages of using a PIC programmer such as this).

Finally, I ordered all the components on-line, from a company called Futurlec.

Some compontnets were purchased only after I started to get the idea of how my circuit should be deisgned.

On the equipment side, I also decided that I need an Oscilloscope device - As expected, these devices are usually quit expensive (and I'm not even talking about Logic-Analyzers here). But I had some luck, and found an old, second-hand Oscilloscope in an electronics store nearby a Kenwood cs-4025 device. I even found its original manual on the Internet!

I took me almost 4 months to test, design, build and code the PC and PIC programs, while studying component specs and whitepapers, learning PIC programming using Assembly (using this book which I really recommend) and MPLAB, but one night, at 2 AM in the morning, I had a little victory - It was finished, and it worked!!!