PIC18F4455 USB Bootloader

This week I’ve put the USB Bootloader on my PIC experimental board. A bootloader allows you to program the PIC uC without a programmer. More info about using the bootloader can be found on this site. This post addresses some problems I had with the bootloader.

Using Eclipse for PIC development

I’m a fan of the Eclipse environment and I try to use it as much as possible for as many programming languages as possible. There’s the default JAVA environment, but you can also download the CDT plug-in to handle your C / C++ needs, PDT for writing PHP, Aptana for Javascript and so on.. But I hadn’t used it before to write code for my PIC microcontroller. I liked the idea though, because the MPLAB environment of Eclipse (in which you normally write the code) is a bit old-fashioned..

Repair boot.ini with a network boot

I changed my boot.ini file by accident yesterday and soon realised I had a big problem.. The booting process didn’t find my Windows installation any longer. The normal reflex would be to grab a boot disk and fix the problem in DOS. I couldn’t do this because my laptop does not have a floppy drive station. Well, no problem you say, just insert some Windows installation CD and boot from that CD. You guessed it, my CD-station on my laptop is broken for a few months now, so I didn’t have a means to boot my laptop. Another option would be to boot from a usb device, but my BIOS doesn’t support this. On the other hand, my BIOS DOES support a network boot (PXE). In this article I will briefly cover the steps I took to repair my laptop.

Using Eclipse for multi-module Maven2 projects

I have been diving into a lot of Java and Eclipse recently. We’re setting up a Continuous Integration system at work, using Hudson as the engine. Because sometimes things didn’t went as smooth as I would have liked them to go I decided to write some posts about setting up the system. In this first post we’ll be setting up Eclipse with the necessary plugins.