Sorry about the confusion. The only problem I have with the AVRs emulation is that what the emulator sees from your circuit is not necessarily what the production chip will see. Scenix and (I think) the MChip ICD avoid this. I worked with 8080s the last time I did this (yes I'm old) and we had many cases where the production board was F'd but with the emulator in-place, everything worked just fine! Ha-Ha! In one case, just touching a logic probe to the pin that was causing the problem modified the signal enough to cause the board to start working. The uncertainty principle at work. The 'tron boys increased the impedance of the signal and all was well. We had a couple of times where the pin was getting a solid signal, but the connecting wire was being blown inside the chip! Emulator handled the load just fine so nobody could figure out why the production chips couldn't see the signal. One of the guys finally noticed that when a new chip was inserted in the board, it would get hot for just a sec after the initial power up, but never again. We lost a lot of money on those projects. Mostly cases of piss poor electronic design (not my responsibility at the time, thank you) but harder than hell to track down. James Newton, webmaster http://get.to/techref (hint: you can add your own private info to the techref) mailto:jamesnewton@geocities.com 1-619-652-0593 phone -----Original Message----- From: Dave VanHorn [mailto:dvanhorn@cedar.net] Sent: Friday, September 10, 1999 9:11 AM To: eplus1@san.rr.com Subject: Re: Re: MChip F___ Up! ----- Original Message ----- From: James Newton To: Dave VanHorn Sent: Friday, September 10, 1999 11:06 AM Subject: RE: Re: MChip F___ Up! > its a list including the processor, dev kit, and ICE $200+$50=$250 Ok, but the way it reads, it sounds like the CPU is $250 (!) It's an amazingly low cost way to get started. My Zilog startup was a $1200 emulator with UV erasable parts, ($75 each) and the best part is that the emulator is useless. You can't single step it, it blows the stack. Bug had existed for 10 years when I discovered it, but it's not documented. I had to switch to Signum emulators at $8k each to get a workable platform. This little AVR ice is almost as good as the signum, missing only the external hardware breakpointing, and trace buffer.