The Via VT1618 audio codec is used in a number of Via chipsets, including the VT8237, as found on the Via EPIA EN15000G and EN12000EG motherboards. These motherboards provide 3 audio jacks as part of the back panel I/O, Line-out, Line-in and Mic-in, however the Line-in and Mic-in connectors can also be switched in software to act as outputs, providing Rear (left and right), Center and LFE (subwoofer) channels. This seems to be marketed by Via as "Smart 5. Support" and seems to be an implementation of the "Universal Audio Jack" (UAJ). This makes it possible to drive a 5.1 surround sound system with out the need for an external decoder driven from a digital audio connection.

So, you have a small LCD character display, with a Hitachi HD44780 compatible controller and a PIC. You want to control the LCD display from the PIC. There seems to be quite a bit of sample code on the web, however, it seems to either have been written or an alternative microcontroller or in assembly. Well, here's a very basic library for writing to the controller from SDCC.

Microcontroller development under Linux at times is still a little problematic. Many applications exist to enable compiling of C, assembly language and for programming many different microcontrollers. Here we will consider how to program Microchip's PIC family of microcontrollers.

SDCC, the Small Device C Compiler, is an open source C compiler for a number of microcontrollers and small platforms. This document describes how to get SDCC installed and working under Linux, provides an example code and a description of how to compile it for the 16f877, 16f84 and 18f252.

LAMP is the name given to a program stack that is commonly used for developing dynamic web-pages. These applications being the GNU/Linux operating System, Apache webserver, MySQL database and either PHP, Perl or Python.

I have found the the low-cost programmer provided in schematic form by Jaakko Hyvätti (which is based on the jdm84v23 by Jens Madsen), though slow, to be acceptable for my needs. I currently have the device working with Picprog on a breadboard, however I would like a much more solid version ;-)