February 2021 Meeting Report

We commenced with some general discussion of recent worldwide geo-political developments.

Andrew enquired about configuring timers 1 & 2 in PICs in order to get an exact interrupt frequency.

We looked at a PIC PWM online calculator which generates the register values needed for given frequency & duty times, and provides some sample code. http://eng-serve.com/pic/pic_pwm.html

We had a quick look at the new Raspberry Pi Pico. Why is Raspberry Foundation getting in to the crowded microcontroller space?

You can program the Pi Pico with python using Thony - an IDE and it can use all the Adafruit circuit python libraries.

Or program the Pi Pico using C++ & the Arduino IDE.

Finally the Chicago pile, the world's first artifical nuclear reactor somehow popped up on the agenda.

Here's a link to the wiki page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

A model of the device :