Now it so happens that I stol^H^H uh, came across this large illuminated pushbutton recently. It has a large 25mm button illuminated by an incandescent lamp. The switch is a highly reliable microswitch. It was just begging to be used in this project. So I’m designing the thing around it.

To the left is my first conceptual design (scanned off the back of an envelope!). It has the big button at the left, an LED readout for the speed (in BPM) and a knob to set the speed. Underneath the knob is a slide switch to turn the power on and off.

After some research, I settled on the PIC16F84A microcontroller from Microchip. I like this part because it doesn’t need any expensive development kit. These development kits can cost hundreds of dollars, so this represents considerable saving. The PIC16F84A is also readily available and cheap at around AU$10.

• 8 bit RISC CPU core - single cycle per instruction
• On board oscillator (external crystal required)
• Runs at any speed up to 10MHz
• Built in timer-counter
• 13 bidirectional I/O pins
• 1k FLASH memory for program
• 68 bytes of CMOS RAM
• 64 bytes of FLASH for storing data
• In-circuit programming capability

The in-circuit programming combined with the flash program memory sold me on this part. I can develop the software and test it without needing an emulator and without having to constantly swap chips in and out of a programmer or mess about with UV erasers. This should make the software development cycle fast and cheap.

On the downside, it has no serial port. I’ll have to bit-bash the serial output. Still, I’ve done this sort of thing before so it should be no problem.

When performing on stage, we have a problem keeping all our MIDI instruments in time with each other. So I need to create a master sync source. This would be a box which can send a MIDI ‘Start’ command when a button is pushed. It would be nice if it could synchronise this start command with the first beat of the bar so the music never skips a beat.

I decided this would be a good project for me to get back into microcontrollers. It’s been about six years since I’ve done any microcontroller work so I’m a bit out of touch with the latest in that field.