> I am curious about how people debug their code once they have
> burned it
> into the chip and it does not work correctly.  Would appreciate any
> feedback I can get.

It helps to have at least some debug output. And serial output or LCD is
nice, but a row of LEDs or even a single LED might be enough. I debugged
my Zero Pin Bootloader with 8 LEDs.

IMHO the key techniques are reasoning and partitioning. You have a
therory about how your program should work. Use feedback to check
whether this is indeed the case, and if not to find out what and where
it goesd wrong.

If everything fails I start partitioning. I make the program perform
some minimal function that still fails, and then I start deleting other
code, untill the function starts working. Now I examine the last part I
deleted realy closely and in most cases I can start pulling out my hair
for my stupidity.

I have an ICD2 but up to now I never used it. Note that an ICD1 or ICD2
might be well within your budget.

I often use a 'bigger' chip for all but the final checks. The extra
memory, pins and maybe a UART come in handy for debugging. I have a
16f628 gadget that ends in 8 pins that fit in a 12F socket. The leftmost
8 pins of a 14-pin PIC have the same layout as an 8-pin chip.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products

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