An important thing to keep in mind as one chooses among the various DIY programmers: Some designs use no inverting buffers or transistor equivalents, some an odd or even number on the various leads ICProg is wonderful (IMHO) in that you can select the hardware setup and adjust this parameter but the various websites just tell you it is compatible and not always the specific settings needed ( methinks pulling RB4 low is mentioned in the ICProg docs but just hard to find ) Kinda means you need to understand the microchip programming docs if you DIY another another Dave >Jan-Erik: >> Get familiar with chip specs >Agree. >> (and their associated programming specs) >Disagree. I don't think a "beginner" (as from the subject) >should have to care much about the programming inner works. xxxx >another Dave: >and if you do try a 16F628, connect pin 10 (RB4) to ground during programming >or if you try a 16F877, connect pin 36 (RB3) to ground, otherwise they will >not program. The 16F84(A) doesn't have these PGM pin constraints, by the way. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.