Enhanced mid-range

I had a browse through a comparison of Microchip's PIC microcontrollers and noticed the enhanced mid-range. I'm thinking about controlling some motors and some of these enhanced range have multiple PWM outputs. I bought a couple of PIC16F1827 to try.

I have been using the MPLab X IDE with XC8 C compiler on a laptop running Linux to program the PICs. I use Pickit 3 to send the code into the PIC and that is compatible with the enhanced PIC16s. I discovered the MPLAB Code Configurator which should help setting up the new PICs - it doesn't work with any of the old ones.

The enhanced range have various improvements, including being optimised for C code with a bigger instruction set, more interrupt lines, more input and output options, such as more analogue and PWM lines. It seems there is a more powerful internal clock, up to 32MHz on some PICs. If that works well, not needing an external crystal would be handy, not least because on small PICs that would free up two more GPIO pins.

I thought I'd set up a simple test bed and see what I can do.