Microchip Technology AC164142 Data Sheet

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© 2011, Microchip Technology Incorporated, Printed in the U.S.A. All Rights Reserved. 08/10

DS51954A

The Consumer-band BPSK 7.2 kbps PLM PICtail™ Plus Daughter Board provides a low cost
method for the development and testing of consumer applications implementing a Powerline
Communication Softmodem, which is driven by a dsPIC33F device. The daughter board
operates at a consumer-band carrier frequency of 129.6 kHz.

Any dsPIC33F device with at least 2 Kbytes RAM, 16 Kbytes of Flash memory, four Output
Compare channels, one DMA channel, and one 12-bit ADC input (at least 500 ksps), can be
used with this daughter board. Please refer to the user’s guide for more details regarding the
resource requirements.

The evaluation kit includes a pair of daughter boards and two High Voltage (HV) AC power
line adapter cables. Two Explorer 16 boards (purchased separately – PN: DM240001) are
required to evaluate the daughter boards. A Microchip programming/debugging tool is also
required to program/debug the firmware on the dsPIC33F device.

The MPLAB Integrated Development Environment (IDE) should be installed prior to using
a daughter board for application development. While MPLAB IDE provides the assembler
tools for development, demo applications are written in the C language and require a C
compiler to be installed. Microchip’s MPLAB C Compiler seamlessly integrates into
MPLAB IDE. Both the MPLAB IDE and MPLAB C compiler are free (see the note below)
and are available for download at 

www.microchip.com/MPLAB

 and 

www.microchip.com/

compilers

, respectively.

For free demo source code and more information, please visit the related web page at

www.microchip.com/powerline

. From the landing page, select Consumer-band BPSK

7.2 kbps PLM PICtail Plus Daughter Board. In the download section, select a demo
application (such as the Ping-Pong demo), to download an archive file that contains the
related demo source code files. Refer to the user’s guide in the download section for
additional information.

After downloading the ping-pong demo application code and installing the development tools,
use the following procedure to run the demonstration:

1.

Insert a dsPIC33FJ256GP710A PIM into the first Explorer 16 Development Board.

2.

Plug a daughter board into the PICtail Plus expansion slot on this Explorer 16 Develop-
ment Board and connect the RCA jack of the HV adapter cable (provided in the kit) to the
daughter board.

3.

Plug the AC end of the HV adapter cable into an 110V/220V power outlet.

4.

Connect a Microchip programming/debugging tool to the Explorer 16 Development Board
and power up the Explorer 16 Development Board.

5.

Double-click the pingpong.mcp file to load the ping-pong demo project into MPLAB
IDE.

6.

Choose your programming tool in MPLAB IDE by selecting Programmer > Select
Programmer, and then select the tool you are using to program the dsPIC33F device.

7.

Build the project by selecting Project > Build All.

8.

Download your code into the dsPIC33F device by selecting Programmer > Program.

9.

Repeat steps 1 through 8 for the second daughter board.

10. The demo code previously downloaded pings frames of data back and forth between the

two evaluation kits. Initiate the demonstration by pressing the S5 button on either of the
Explorer 16 Development Boards. The transmit frame count (TX) and the receive frame
count (RX) displayed on the Explorer 16 Development Board LCD screen should
increment for both of the daughter boards.

Standard Evaluation (Free) – All optimization levels are enabled for 60 days, but
then revert to optimization level 1 only.