Bob Lives!

After a couple of false starts with dead voltage regulators, Bob (my daughter named it) the PIC based ethernet device lives in a more permanent incarnation.  Bob is made from bits and pieces I had around the place (I now have several very dead network hubs).  The budget for the project was zero 😉

My Dad provided me with the PIC prototyping board pictured above and many of the pieces as well as the PIC18F452.  The ENC28J60 ethernet controller was kindly provided by Microchip through their very generous free samples.

The original voltage regulator on the PIC prototyping board didn’t seem to be up to powering both the PIC and the ethernet controller, so I went through my old retired networking gear until I found a 3.3V regulator.  Unfortunately I think I popped it in the process of removing it from the board and it no longer worked :(.  In the end I used a 7805 5V regulator and then ran the output of that through a pair of diodes in a bridge rectifier (thank again for the help with that one Dad) to drop the voltage down to about 3.5V or so.

Now I need to get my PIC Forth running on this hardware and then I’ll have a networked Forth device I can play with 🙂