Getting Started with MPLAB® Harmony v3 Peripheral Libraries on PIC32MK GP MCUs: Step 6
Build, Program, and Observe the Outputs
Verify that the temperature sensor (MikroElectronika Weather click board) is connected to mikroBUS™ 1 on the PIC32MK General Purpose (GP) Development Board.
Connect the Type-A male to Micro-B USB cable to the Micro-B Serial USB port (J25) on the PIC32MK GP Development Board.
The PIC32MK GP Development Board allows using the PICkit On Board (PKOB) for debugging. Connect the Type-A male to Micro-B USB cable to Micro-B DEBUG USB port (J12) to power and debug the PIC32MK GP Development Board.
Go to File > Project Properties and make sure that the PKOB 4 is selected as the debugger under Hardware Tools and XC32 (v4.30) is selected as the Compiler Toolchain for XC32.
Click Apply, then OK.
Clean and build your application by clicking on the Clean and Build button.
Program your application to the device, by clicking on the Make and Program button.
The lab will build and program successfully.
Open the Tera Term terminal application on your PC (from the Windows® Start menu by pressing the Start button). Select the Serial Port.
Click OK.
Change the baud rate.
Select Setup > Serial port from the Tera Term window. Select 115200 from the Speed drop down selections. Click OK.
You will see the temperature values (in °F) being displayed on the terminal every 500 milliseconds, as shown:
Also, notice the LED1 blinking at a 500 millisecond rate.
You may vary the temperature by placing your finger on the temperature sensor for a few seconds.
Press the S1 switch on the PIC32MK GP Development Board to change the default sampling rate to one second.
Every subsequent press of the S1 switch on the PIC32MK GP Development Board changes the default sampling rate to two seconds, four seconds and 500 ms and back to one second in cyclic order as shown:
While the temperature sampling rate changes on every S1 switch press, notice the LED1 toggling at the same sampling rate.
Results
You observed that the application displayed the current room temperature values on the serial terminal every 500 milliseconds. You were able to change the temperature sampling values dynamically by pressing a user switch on the development kit. You could exercise sampling changes to one second, two seconds, four seconds, and cycle back to 500 milliseconds every time you pressed the user switch. You also observed that a user LED was toggled every time the current temperature is displayed on the serial terminal.
Analysis
You have successfully created your first application using MPLAB® Harmony v3 on the PIC32MK GP microcontroller. Your application used all the fundamental elements that go into building a real-time application. Your application successfully read temperature sensor values and displayed them periodically over a serial terminal on a PC. The application also took user input by pressing a switch on the development board.
In this application, you used MPLAB® Code Configurator (MCC) to configure a PIC32MK GP device and to use the MPLAB Harmony v3 Framework. You used the clock configurator to set up the CPU clock and timer (Timer1) clock. You configured SPI6, UART6, TMR2, CORE TIMER, and GPIO peripheral libraries. You also configured Direct Memory Access (DMA) using the DMA configurator. You used the pin configurator to set up the pins for LED and switch functions.
Conclusions
This tutorial provided you training for configuring and using all the fundamental components needed to build a real-time application on a PIC32MK GP microcontroller with the MPLAB Harmony v3 Framework. As a next step, you may customize this application and reconfigure some of the components used in this tutorial. You could also add new components (PLIBs, etc.) to enhance this application to realize your end application.
