>This is why I'm recommending the PIC16F877 which has a plethora
>of pins available.  I wouldn't even pass out any of the PORTB pins.
>I would use PORTA, PORTC and PORTD instead - These 20+ pins should
>be more than enough for a newbie to learn to program the chip on.

This sounds good to me as well. It would also mean that (say) 4 of the port
B pins could be permanently wired to on board LED's for the led blink/debug
functions. With more than one led an illustration can be made of a binary
counter as well.


On the ICD line of thought, would it be worth coming up with software that
ran on a PC (or whatever host) that handled the ICD interface instead of
using a separate Micro the way Microchip do their ICD units. The only reason
I can see for going that way is the high voltage generator, and that is not
necessarily needed, especially as we are considering using LVP.

The voltage measurement functions on the ICD seem to be only monitoring, and
do not lock out the programming mode if they report low voltage due to the
wrong LED being used :)

I do not know if any of the existing bootloaders do the ICD type function as
well, or if they are purely a loader. The extra code for ICD functions
cannot be that much that it will overflow the top 256 bytes.

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