Simple PIC16F84 Programmer for Beginners

Figure 1 

The project was built as a serial PIC16F84 programmer that does not require an external power supply since it extracts power form the RS232 connection of PC.

One of the first serial in-system programmable microcontrollers is the Microchip PIC16F84 which is being used for serial and parallel PC ports and are being published on the Internet today. It became a popular microcontroller despite its somewhat unusual design of having 128 byte of page RAM, Register direct or indirect memory mapping. It uses a flash microcontroller PIC16F84 for easy availability and programmable due to the free of charge of the developer environment MPLAB from Microchip and due to availability of several examples.

The circuit is suitable for use with laptop computers even though the RS232 voltages are often too low. The female connector CON1 with 9-pin is connected directly to the serial output of the PC. It does not contain a ZIF-socket since it was not designed as production programmer but instead, it uses an open IC socket.

The layout of the PCB is 1;1 and is available as PDF formatted file. The programming samples for software and application can be found at several links.

Click here to see the rest of the project.