Hi there,
I'm relatively new to PIC's also (about six months now) and here is my two
cents worth.
First of all, at this time PIC's are my hobby to aid in learning embedded
control, not a business. I am a Controls Engineer / Electrical Engineer.
I did the usual searching and reading to get the scoop on what a beginner
should do and also found all the stuff on the 16F84. I also knew that I
would want to progress to bigger and better PIC's later. I built my
programmer using schematics for an incredibly inexpensive programmer
designed by Bojan Dobaj called the PIC16PRO. You can find it at
http://www.picallw.com/.
I used his software but found that it was crippled (only does the 16F84 or
will do others with no eeprom support and limited code space). This works
GREAT for the 16F84 though. If you want support for a great majority of the
other chips (including the 18F series), use the software called IC-Prog
which works well with the PIC16PRO programmer I described above. It can be
found at http://www.ic-prog.com/ and is uncrippled and free.
The programmer worked flawlessly the first time I used it after construction
and to date I have successfully programmed the following chips:
(PLEASE keep in mind that this is NOT a production programmer that programs
and verifies at different voltage levels......hobby use only, OK.)
16F84, 16F84A, 16F628, 16F628, 16F74, 16F876, 16F876A, 18F4230.
Hope this helps.

Regards,
Stephen D. Barnes

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