I doubt that the programmer was designed to supply 250 mA so I'm not surprised that it protested audibly. And yes, you could harm your programmer with a bad chip. It's called 'shoot through'. All you need is one fried CMOS FET to create a short from VCC to Gnd. R Rick Regan wrote: > > I know there have been many "fried PIC" stories on this > list but I don't know if I've seen one like this. Due to > some temporary mis-wiring (can't say I know exactly what I > did!) the PIC 16C745 on my board got extremely hot. > After correcting the wiring the chip "worked" (at > least the functions I was using). However, it still got > hot and I discovered it was drawing 250 ma of current (should have been closer to 15 ma). > > The interesting thing is that when I read the contents of > the chip using a PICstart+ I heard a noticeable high- > pitched hum. Can you harm a programmer with a bad chip? > (please say no). > > I'm also curious about what could have gone wrong with the > chip such that it still appeared to function. > > Needless to say, I've scrapped the chip. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.