<VBG> I've tickled somebody's "how much did I pay for this and he thinks its
worthless" bone...

Andy, you know I love you and your sharp wit, and yes, the ICE is a kick
butt tool with all these whiz bang features, and I'll not even argue any of
your points ('cause you got me on all of them, I think) and I would love to
have one (Hint to Tech Tools: I'm possibly for sale <GRIN>) but it still
isn't something that you can drop into every production device you ship.

With an ICD, if a customer returns a board to me, I can connect to the jack
and watch the chip run to see what went wrong. I don't have to desolder a
smt part in plug in the ICE and hope it still exhibits the same problem.
Even if I had an ICE I would have an ICD as well. I'd use the ICD until I
needed to see something it made it hard to see, and then switch to the ICE.

And I will always see what the current production device is seeing, not what
the device (no matter how identical) on the ICE pod is seeing. The cable
from target to pod or pin length differences won't change the signals.

I can live with out (use debugging techniques I've learned over the years to
replace) all the fancy "stop and tell me if it does this" stuff, but I want
to know what is actually happening in the production part, and I can't live
without that.

BTY, the SXKey
http://www.parallaxinc.com/sx/sx.htm
that I do most of my work on DOES do 2, 6 (50Mhz in fact), 7, 8, and 10 for
the Scenix SX devices I use most of the time
http://www.scenix.com
and I understand that the Advanced Transdata version supports 1, 4 and 5 as
well.

---
James Newton mailto:jamesnewton@geocities.com 1-619-652-0593
http://techref.massmind.org NEW! FINALLY A REAL NAME!
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-----Original Message-----
From: pic microcontroller discussion list
[mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of Andrew Kunz
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2000 09:04
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: MPLAB-ICD firmware version 2.04 and other problems


James,

I have some questions about the ICD, since I don't own one perhaps you can
answer some questions:

     1) Does the ICD have break-on-data-change (read, or write, or either)?
I
need it for 2 registers.

     2) Does it have break-on-wdt-timeout (vs reset on t/o)?

     3) Does it have stack dump capability?

     4) Does it have break-on-stack-under/overflow?

     5) Does it support 12 levels of stack vs. the normal 8?

     6) Does it support 25MHz operation?

     7) Does it allow me to program the oscillator to any value I want so
that I
can determine exactly what crystal I need to hit the performance exactly,
without having to resort to having a collection of crystals to solder on
(SMT
crystals/resonators).  (This is just ONE reason why I hated the Advanced
Transdata ICE, btw).

     8) Does it allow me to set a breakpoint on the fly?  I mean, while it's
running can I just hit a "BREAK" button and regain control of the device?

     9) Does it give me full access to all the pins on the device?

     10)  Does it give me full access to all RAM and ROM in the device?

These are all features I use regularly on my Tech-Tools Mathias.

I'm about to start another 876-based project (using an SMT device) and if
your
ICD can do all the above, it would really be something useful.

Thanks!

Andy