Preface Writing this book turned out to be much more work than I had expected and believe me, I was already expecting a lot. This project would have never been possible if I did not have 110% support and understanding from my wife. Special thanks also go to Steve Bowling, a friend, a pilot and an expert of Microchip 16-bit architecture, for reviewing the technical content of this book and providing many helpful suggestions for the demonstration projects and hardware experiments. Many thanks go to Eric Lawson for constantly encouraging me to write and for all the time he spent to fix my eternally long running sentences and my bad use of punctuation. I owe big thanks also to Thang Nguyen, who was first to launch the idea of the book; Joe Drzewiecky and Vince Sheard for patiently listening to my frequent laments, always working hard on making MPLAB a better tool; Calum Wilkie and Guy McCarthy for addressing quickly all my questions and offering so much help and insight into the inner workings of the MPLAB C compiler and libraries. Among the technical reviewers of the second edition, I would like to add special thanks to Stewart Cording, Tom Mignone, and Wayne Duquaine who helped me adapt the code to the many new families of PIC24 devices. But I would like to extend my gratitude to all my friends, ex-colleagues at Microchip Technology and the many embedded control engineers I have been honored to work with