Throughout these tutorials we present various programming exercises at which to try your hand. In Sections 1 and 2 these can be done with the Vlab. In Section 3 the exercises require the use of the development board.

Associated with most tutorials are a few simple exercises which allow you to experiment with the basic program presented in that section. You will only be expected to use the commands that have already been introduced to you. None of them should tax your brain too much, but they will, hopefully, encourage you to think of alternative ways in which the same basic task can be tackled, or to consider other simple tasks that can be achieved using similar techniques.

As part of the exercises, it is recommended that you also use the Vlab to experiment with each of the new commands introduced in the various tutorials.

CHALLENGES

We also include two groups of more sophisticated problems which challenge you to write complete programs that perform specific tasks, such as controlling lights at a traffic junction, for example. You don't need to do them, but we expect you'll respond to their challenges! The first group follows Section 1, the second follows Section 2.

The challenges in these first 2 sections are designed to be solved using the Vlab. The Vlab contains a number of "add ons", such as the "roadworks" shown opposite, to give you visual proof that you have solved the problem.

Two other challenges await you at the end of Section 3 - there are two program listings which have a number of intentional mistakes in them. Your task is to debug them and get them working as a frequency counter and lottery predictor respectively!

By the end of the tutorials, you should know how to get the PICmicro to respond to switches and other external signal sources, send data to various types of display, to create sound, to be the heart of a 24-hour clock, to store data in its non-volatile EEPROM memory, and to monitor an intruder alarm system.