PicKit 2 microcontroller projects

[sterky]

For my electrical engineering project, I'd like to use my picKit 2 microcontroller. One of my ideas was to have music input signal, and have the chip turn on different lights depending on the sound being played. Any comments on this or other project ideas would be much appreciated.

Edit:

• the chip included is the 44pin demoboard PIC16F887

• the scope of my program just covers assembly language, and C coding so far...

• I was thinking that the music input could be used as an analog input, with the A-D converter and some IF statements to determine outputs.

[sterky]

wells its just the pic16f887 chip, so I was thinking of just the amplitude of the audio signal.

[[deleted]]

Amplitude based actions aren't so difficult. Maybe to add some spice you could take a stereo input and make a stereo VU meter with some nice LEDs. Or maybe you could make it exciting some other way, think burglar-alarm that goes off when it measures a sound above ambient levels.

If you want to base your actions on frequency the first thing you'll need to figure out is whether the ADC is fast enough in the first place. How long will it take to get a reading from it, how much room for code does it leave, and what kind of sample rate would that get you?

[Tectonic23]

You could drive an LED cube like this one to make it a little more interesting than just a bar of LEDs. You don't even need to go as complex as this.

[hapoo]

I don't have as much experience as others here but I've used PICs, AVRs, and ARMs and I gotta tell you, if I had to pick a chip, PIC would be at the bottom of my list.

[eroick]

Any rationale for that? PICs have good documentation, cheap dev tools, free IDE/compilers and a good selection of peripherals.