Not sure if anybody is interested but you can get a PICKit 2 Debug Express for £9.99 inc shipping when it usually costs £42.65 with a coupon from Everyday Practical Electronics

The kit is a PICkit 2 debugger/programmer dongle and a PIC16F887 on a protoboard.

Go to www.microchipdirect.com and add DV164121 to your cart after changing the country to UK. When you check out, enter EPEPIC08 as the discount coupon and it'll drop the price of the kit to 28p. Together with shipping, it should come out to be £9.99.

I've always meant to try PIC...

But I fear some detail is wrong

DV164121 comes out at 28.08 GBP and the coupon code doesn't do anything...

http://www.microchipdirect.com/productsearch.aspx?Keywords=DV164121

I just tried it and it looks like you have to log in first for some reason.

Go to the site, set it to UK, create an account, add the kit, type in the code and then checkout.

I still have an unused cypress psoc thingy here.
Or is that not pic?
Couldn't find anything to do with it, or find the time to learn this stuff.

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/288648

Nope. Not PIC.

Thanks - I'd already created an account but I logged out and tried again and it went from £28.08 to 28p as you said

I guess I'll have a PIC programmer soon then... hope there's a linux interface; I guess I should have looked!

Looks like you're in luck. Microchip helpfully provide source so people have made it work under Linux.

Nice one, ordered, hope it's more use than my two PSOC kits!

The kit arrived today for me.

Ah yes but the PSoC kits were free

I do use the mini programmer dongle out of the PSoC kit though. Much easier than lugging around the full ICE kit.

Mine's due to be delivered to work, so maybe it'll give me something to look forward to on Monday morning!

(BEWARE! PIC RANT!)

For me, "look forward to" and "PIC" don't ever appear in the same sentance!

I'm not even sure how people cope with the MPLAB, it's awful, you maximise a source file and the project workspace explorer maximises along with the output window because they've implemented those as MDI children too.

Don't get me started on the microchip C compiler either, it's crap - it doesn't work. I don't want to sit there and analyse every mathematical statement to ensure that it's generated the correct code.

On the bright side, they have a shed load of USB endpoints which is why we selected one recently, but I nearly tore my hair out getting to the final stage. If only my processor of choice had more than 4 endpoints.




Have fun!!!

It was waiting for me, but I don't know when I'll have the time to fart around with it.