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resistor tied to the /MCLR pin, and a suitable 5-volt power supply.
Many PICmicros other than the 16F84, as well as oscillators of fre-
quencies other than 4 MHz, may be used with the PicBasic Pro
Compiler.
The PicBasic Pro Compiler produces code that may be pro-
grammed into a wide variety of PICmicro microcontrollers having
from 8 to 84 pins and various on-chip features, including A/D con-
verters, hardware timers, and serial ports. For general purpose
PICmicro development using the PicBasic Pro Compiler, the PIC
16F84, 16F876, and 16F877 are the current PICmicros of choice.
These microcontrollers use flash technology to allow rapid erasing
and reprogramming to speed program debugging. With the click of
the mouse in the programming software, the flash PICmicro can be
instantly erased and then reprogrammed again and again. Other
PICmicros in the 12C67x, 14C000, 16C55x, 16C6xx, 16C7xx,
16C9xx, 17Cxxx, and 18Cxxx series are either one-time program-
mable (OTP) or have a quartz window in the top (JW) to allow era-
sure by exposure to ultraviolet light for several minutes. The PIC
16F84 and 16F87x devices also contain between 64 and 256 bytes
of nonvolatile data memory that can be used to store program data
and other parameters, even when the power is turned off. This
data area can be accessed simply by using the PicBasic Pro
Compiler’s READ and WRITE commands. (Program code is always
permanently stored in the PICmicro’s code space, whether the
power is on or off.)
By using a flash PICmicro for initial program testing, the debug-
ging process may be sped along. Once the main routines of a pro-
gram are operating satisfactorily, a PICmicro with more capabili-
ties or expanded features of the compiler may be utilized.

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