Hi Olin,

Hey it's nice to see you ask for something. :)
Challenges are fun.

I hope it is not as esoteric as the skin effect differences of stranded
versus solid wire on the cable going to your target. :)

Seriously, I'll take a stab:

1) How about pull down resistors on the PGC and PGD lines at the programmer
end of things (not at the target side)?

2) You never mentioned what you Vpp rise time is.
   I'm assuming you don't have any capacitor hanging from /MCLR to ground
since you did not mention that in your post, correct?

3) Your target PIC on the breadboard does not have Fosc supplied to it
correct?
   From your post I can infer that you don't have it on the breadboard, but
if you do, you might need to kill Fosc if your Vpp rise time does not meet
the programming specification of the current PIC.

4) Signal line ringing issues due to improper line termination? Perhaps 270
ohm series resistors instead of 2000 ohm resistors?

5) I hope you did not find out that the other target PIC pins not used
during ICSP are not floating while in programming mode? I hope this is not
true since the programming specs usually say that they do float.


6) Radix was not explicitly defined for every constant in your source code.
:)
   (I could not resist Olin -- this is actually making fun of myself!)

I had to make an attempt to make you smile after all that frustrating
troubleshooting!


Hope things work out for you.


Take care Olin,

Regards,

Ken Pergola

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