Making a Siemens C55 Data Cable

Hi! Recently I've been developing a GSM access control system for eLab Hackerspace using an old Siemens C55 cell phone and, as such, I needed a data cable to connect it to a PIC microcontroller. I searched on ebay for one but it turned out that they were a little expensive and I began thinking about a way to make myself a data cable.

(Click the photo for better resolution in Picasa Photostream)

Luckily, after searching for a while in my "old power supplies box" (a box where I store all the old phone chargers and power supplies), I found two chargers for old Siemens phones, having the connector that I needed. However, I quickly realized that they only had the VCC and GND pins and I needed a connector with Tx and Rx pins too.

Since I had two chargers I decided to try to modify the connector of one of them to add two more pins and it worked perfectly! :)

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Using Piklab with Tiny PIC Bootloader

Following my previous post on How to Setup a PIC Microcontroller Development Environment in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot With Piklab + SDCC, now I'll show you how to use the Tiny PIC Bootloader with Piklab.

Piklab already has programming interfaces for various programmers, including the Tiny Bootloader. To configure it you must go to "Settings > Configure Programmers... > Tiny Bootloader" and then set your serial port and it's specific settings. In my case, since I use a USB <->Serial TTL Cable (see my previous post on how to make a Low Cost (1,85€) USB to RS232 LVTTL Serial Cable), I configure it with the following data:

• Port Selection: /dev/ttyUSB0
• Specific > Port Speed: 19200
• Specific > Timeout: 300
• Specific > No of Retries: 5

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

After inserting all the correct configurations for your serial connection, Click "Apply" and you're ready to go. To program you just have to go to "Programmer > Program". Do not forget to click the Reset button of your development board to reset the PIC and initiate bootloader when you want to program it.

Easy, right? Yes, but it doesn't always work. :( I had it working when I used Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and some version of Piklab that I can't remember now but since I upgraded to Oneiric Ocelot and a new version of Piklab, the Tiny Bootloader programming interface stopped working. However, there is another easy way to use Tiny Bootloader with Piklab.

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How to setup a PIC microcontroller development environment in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot with piklab + sdcc

Hi! In this blog entry I'll show you how to setup a development environment to develop and compile code for Microchip's PIC microcontrollers. We'll need three main packages:

1. gputils - a collection of tools for the Microchip (TM) PIC microcontrollers. It includes gpasm, gplink and gplib.
2. sdcc - small device C compiler
3. piklab - an integrated development environment (IDE) for applications based on Microchip PIC and dsPIC microcontrollers similar to the MPLAB environment. It integrates with several compiler and assembler toolchains. It supports the most common programmers (serial, parallel, ICD2, Pickit2, Picstart+), the ICD2 debugger, and several bootloaders (Tiny, Pickit2 and Picdem).

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