Whilst you are going through this course you will want to actually program a PICmicro microcontroller. To do this you need two items: a programmer to put the code you develop into a PICmicro microcontroller, and a circuit to allow the microcontroller to run making it able to test your code.

There are lots of options here ranging from small PICmicro microcontroller project boards through to more complex systems that have debugging tools.

Our approach to this need has been to develop a circuit board that provides a platform for both programming a PICmicro microcontroller as well as circuitry that includes a range of flexible input and output ports as well as switches and displays.

In 1997 we made our first PICmicro microcontroller development board: this consisted of a main board with switches and LEDs and a socket that would allow an PIC16F84 to be programmed and tested.

At the end of 2003 we introduced a new range of microcontroller products which were named E-blocks. The E-blocks series replaces the fixed development boards with a set of blocks that can be plugged together, each of which adding functionality or new components to the system. This results in a highly adaptable learning and programming system for microcontrollers. E-blocks are available as single boards or as solution kits designed to help acheive a specific task.

We continued to improve on the PICmicro microcontroller development board and moved towards the E-block style of board whilst keeping compatibility with the old boards, we continued and expanded the E-blocks range and released a wide variety of different peripheral boards allowing E-blocks to quickly acheive almost any modern piece of technology.

Further details on the Matrix Multimedia range of products and courseware can be found on the Matrix Multimedia web site at: http://www.matrixmultimedia.com.