possible processor problem

[bignick270]

My PIC16f877a seems to be crashing and all the pins start to oscillate extremely fast (as seen on the Digital Analyzer).

This happens when I change code, it doesn't matter what is added or taken away.

It has just started to do this and I have been reprogramming it will success for about a month.

The chip is on a PCB that has given no troubles in the past.

Could the chip be going bad? It has been reprogrammed a lot but it is no where near the life expectancy of the program flash memory.

Also when this happens the voltage regulator seems to "whine" but when the power is reset everything is fine until it goes back into the oscillating state.

[newguy]

Your statement that the regulator starts to whine raises a red flag for me. Does your power supply rail oscillate as well? If so, it sounds like you don't have enough capacitance on Vcc to ground.

[bignick270]

everything is fine on the voltage rail.

I went and commented out a few things and got it working but the funny thing is i went and uncommented them out and added it back in and it works now...

Dang ghost need to get out of the devices lol

[bignick270]

One of the culprits happens to be when I run the function memset(channel1, 0, sizeof(channel1));

channel1 is a 100 element array. I am using memset to set the array back to 0's.

I also have tried using a for loop to run through each element and set it to 0 but the same thing also happens.

Any thoughts?

[PCM programmer]

[bignick270]

i have already removed that code from my source file.

I took a look at the link you posted. I can declare the 100 element arrays without problem but I have to use #locate channel1 = 0xA0 after it so the compiler doesn't give me the out of memory error.

[PCM programmer]

[bignick270]

You are right sir. I double checked the memory map and opened my eyes and realized what my problem was.