Curiosity, Curiosity HPC and Xpress Boards in PICSimLab
Three of PICSimLab’s PIC boards share the same one-line official description: “simple PIC microcontroller development board”. They are the Curiosity, the Curiosity HPC and the Xpress — lightweight boards on the picsim backend, aimed at straightforward PIC projects rather than at imitating one specific feature-rich commercial product in detail.
Overview
All three boards run on the picsim backend and follow the standard PIC workflow in PICSimLab: select the board and a PIC microcontroller, generate an MPLAB X project with the Code Project Wizard, build with XC8, load the hex file and run. They were once in PICSimLab’s experimental set and have since been moved to the stable board list — the current stable documentation lists them as normal boards, so do not treat them as experimental today.
Supported MCUs
| Board | Official description | Backend |
|---|---|---|
| Curiosity | Simple PIC microcontroller development board | picsim |
| Curiosity HPC | Simple PIC microcontroller development board | picsim |
| Xpress | Simple PIC microcontroller development board | picsim |
Unlike McLab2 or PICGenios, the official board pages for these three do not pin the board to a fixed microcontroller list — the PIC chip is chosen when you set the board up in PICSimLab, within the PIC16F/PIC18F families that the picsim backend and the project wizard’s templates cover. If a fixed, documented chip list matters for your course or project, McLab2 and PICGenios publish theirs explicitly.
Backend & debugging
Debugging is MPLAB X Integrated Debug, the standard for every picsim board: with the com-picsim-picsimlab.nbm plugin installed, MPLAB X talks to PICSimLab over a TCP socket (port 1234 by default) to debug and program the simulation. Setup details are in our MPLAB X plugin guide.
What you can do
- Bring simple PIC16F/PIC18F exercises onto a clean, uncluttered board and add only the spare parts your lesson needs.
- Reuse the standard workflow and code patterns from the PIC16F877A blink tutorial and the PIC18F4550 first project — project generation, XC8 build and hex loading are identical on every picsim board.
- Extend the board with displays, buttons and sensors from Modules → Spare parts as the project grows.
Real limits
- “Simple” is the operative word: the official documentation describes these as simple boards and does not document a fixed chip list or a rich onboard peripheral set for them. Any page that promises a specific Curiosity chip/peripheral combination in PICSimLab is going beyond the official documentation.
- All picsim caveats apply: the backend documents a specific peripheral set (ADC, interrupts, WDT, TMR0–TMR2, USART, CCP1–CCP3, EEPROM, I/O ports), not every module of every PIC.
- PICSimLab provides no source editing; MPLAB X + XC8 are required, as with the real boards.
Get PICSimLab from the download page and choose Curiosity, Curiosity HPC or Xpress when a simple PIC board is all your project needs.