Pay a visit to 1st cross street, pettah, and try your luck at various electronic component shops. Some of them have PIC chips, but don't be too smart asking for PIC or Microconrollers. Because you will get NO for an answer for sure. If you can be specific and ask for 16F84, then they will know. If y...

Working with microcontrollers needs bit of reading, planning and proper circuit design, even for a simple project. These devices are extremely susceptible to electrical noise, min/max voltages, signal thresholds, and not least the usage of proper and matching interconnecting devices. As an example, ...

As neo correctly stated, this is a very common problem which has many solutions depending on your design requirements. A very good design practice for any microcontroller is to have output isolation (whether built-in isolation is provided or not). This essentially means NOT connecting output pins DI...