The Lab-X3 by MicroEngineering Labs

The LAB-X3 is a PIC Trainer/Demo board from microEngineering Labs. It can use a variety of 18 pin PICs that plug into the processor socket, however I happen to be using the PIC16F628 in mine. It was designed to be used with the microEngineering Labs PIC Basic compiler, but I use assembly code. Mine cost about $150 with the programmer by buying it in a ‘bundle’ package.

I/O ports on the LAB-X3 consist of the LCD display (2 lines by 20 characters each), the Serial port on the right, a “servo connector”, two user controlled LEDs and two buttons (one of which shares responsibility with MCLR (reset) but you can program the ’628 to make this a general purpose I/O.) I wrote a review of this board in comparison with the Microchip MPLAB-ICD which describes the modifications I made (basically I swapped the LCD’s E-line control and the Servo pin so that the Servo pin could connect to CCP1 on the ’628 and be an input rather than an output.

There is a small prototyping area next to the PIC and all the PIC I/O lines are easily accessible.