While attemping to purchase a PIC16F876 from microchip direct's website, I noticed that there are several variations, identified by a suffix number and/or letter: 04, 04E, 04I, 10E, 20, and 20I. What is the difference between these? Is one more suited to building the GKOS keyboard, or would all of them be satisfactory?
16F87X datasheet page 209 explains additional codes (or search 'PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM' within the datasheet).
Frequency range: 04, 10, 20 (MHz)
Temp Range: blank = commercial, I = industrial, E = Extended
Package P = PDIP (= plastic dual-in-line package, I suppose)
So, I think it should be '04/P' , or '04' on your list. We are using 4 MHz resonator as the clock pulse source.
Thank you for your reply. It did not occur to me that that would be in the data sheets; I'll refer there first now for any questions. I'm looking forward to starting this project now.
You are welcome! Please consider also the Arduino GKOS project. The PIC project is a bit old, using the PS2 keyboard connector which seldom exists on modern PCs. Same goes for RS232 (COM port). Do you have proper tools to program the PIC?
I already purchased the PIC, but thanks for your recommendation.
Since I use linux, I'm planning on building one of the programmers described on gkos.net (not the onboard one…I would have put a link to the page but apparently I'm not allowed to publish links).
I guess you mean this pic prgrammer. Ihope you can still find Piklab in the Ubuntu repositories (using Synaptic).
I actually use debian testing, but I did find piklab (I had to temporarily enable repositories for stable, but it appears to run fine—the project compiles without errors).