This time I’m talking about a good Open Source software I found.When you come to electronics you eventually find micro controllers which have all the components in one chip which is in a computer,that means it has RAM,ROM ,etc.these chips become very useful when you are prototyping specially, as I found when I was designing my first robot in November 2008.But micro controllers need programming and it’s main language used to programming is assembly but currently many people use high level languages for it.However there are many brands,capabilities,types of micro controllers but i’m talking about Microchip PIC micro controllers..Although I was good in electronics I wasn’t good at programming and I was an absolute amature.Now Ktechlab come into my rescue as I was running out of time to the exibition I was planning to participate with the robot.
Ktechlab is an electronic simulator and a microcontroller IDE. Speciality of the IDE is that you can construct a program by flowcharts, and it can be converted to .asm Assembly, .c (C source code), microbe (a basic version for micro controllers) or to a hex file which can be directly programmed to the micro controller or upload the program to the micro controller.However the IDE currently support PIC micro controllers made by Microchip, however when you made the program you can simulate with the circuit simulator with the components in your design which is enebled by a component in electronic simulator called “PIC” and when you got it just load the program the box become to a chip with pins,then you can add other components to the circuit and I did my whole robot in Ktechab :),also I’ll add a new post about the robot as soon as I can.If you are good at programming then no worries, you can just ignore flowchart methord and you can debug a well as simulate the whole circuit with this!
Links for some photos,Due to my busy life i’m unable to fix them to the post but hope you enjoy 🙂
Open Sauced Robots 
Hi!
can you send me some flowcode examples in Ktechlab. I would be very
grateful!
vladimir84_tl @yahoo.com
Okay if you need to know about flowcode usage then it’s better to get the guide in ktechlab wiki! there is a guide name ktechlab.pdf (googling will give instant accsess) and tuxbotix is my blogging alias 😀 also better to have some programming concepts known such as unary,assignment as they are very useful and available in flowcoding! the key things are
1.Must have some knowledge in flowcharts (or at leas read wiki’s on ketechlab site)
2.know about the pinouts of the chip better if use datasheet)
A muito tempo o KtechLab , um aplicativo completo para quem gosta de eletronica tinha parado de funcionar por causa das mudanças na Base Ubuntu, mas agora voltou a funcionar usando o recurso de manter libs anteriores para ele de modo simples e direto.
Segue Link do Script para sua instalação.:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kduxp/files/Pacotes/Eletronica/KtechLab/ktechlab-Install/download
Thank you for the update! As far as i know development of ktechlab was stopped after some time 😦 its a really good system..