AN248

The MCP6S21/2/6/8 family of one, two, six or eight channel Programmable Gain Amplifiers (PGA) communicate using a standard 3-wire Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI?) protocol. This application note shows how to program the six channel MCP6S26 PGA gains, channels and shutdown registers using the PIC16C505 microcontroller.

The PIC16C505 microcontroller does not have a hardware SPI module, therefore, a firmware SPI (Bit Bang) method is used to program the PGA. The MCP6S2X Evaluation Board was used to develop this application note firmware. For additional information, refer to the MCP6S2X Evaluation Board User?s Guide (DS51327), MCP6S21/2/6/8 PGA data sheet (DS21117) and PIC16C505 data sheet (DS40192).