Programming for LED projects

Thread Starter

ke5nnt

Joined Mar 1, 2009
384
I feel I need to explain where I'm at before I ask where I need to go...

I've only been at electronics as kind-of a hobby for a little over a year. My interest started after I got into amateur radio. I've been a public safety type volunteer for a while and my main interest is in LED style "warning lights".

I started with a few leds and a 555 timer and have gotten to the point where I'm working on a project with microcontrollers now. I have a fully completed design for a 2 color LED light, on which I use 60 LEDs (30/color). I largely modified a design I found on the net and have used the .hex code from that project for mine.

Now, where I'd like to go is, the project I modified from used a 16F628A PIC, and the .hex had only one flash pattern in it. I know nothing of writing code, but I'm very interested in learning although I haven't got much in the lines of extra money sitting around for a lot of extra stuff. I'd like to be able to program a pic with multiple flash patterns, and switch between them using a momentary push button switch. Can this be done? Would a different PIC be better? (I really don't know anything about microcontrollers either...some but really not much).

I have the a pic programmer for programming the code from the PC to the PIC, but that's about it.

I'm sorry to be long winded in my post but I'm so lost at this point. Any suggestions?
 
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