Okay it is 12:05am Sunday here in Singapore and I need to go to
bed. Luckily my wife is still watching TV by Jet Li. :)

Anyway, Wouter answered the question: debugger!!!

BAJ: I am not so sure whether you have used any higher 
end MCU (than 12F/16F) like dsPIC or 18F USB. I am very 
new to them as well and I think a debugger will be quite 
useful. 

I confess I am a lousy programmer so I need hardware 
debugging provided by ICD2. I was using an ICE2000 for 
my previous PICC projects on 16C72A/16F872 back in the
year of 2000 to 2002. The real-time debugging helps a 
lot even the code is less than 2k words. People can use 
printf to serail port or other methods to help the debugging 
but sometimes the resource inside the MCU may not allow this.
Of course an ICE2000 is beyond the reach of a hobbyists.
Clone ICD2 may be the ways to go for hobbyists who want to
climb the hill of highed end 18F/PIC24/dsPIC30/dsPIC33.

For the AVR community, they have the excellent AVR-GCC,
AVRdud and JTAG debuggers. For developers of ARM, GCC and
JTAG are there as well. Hopefully there will be JTAG or
similar tools for the next generation of dsPICs/PIC24s.

Regards,
Xiaofan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Byron A Jeff" <byron@cc.gatech.edu>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.hardware.microcontrollers.pic
Sent: Saturday, August 27, 2005 11:20 PM
Subject: Re: [PIC] dsPIC for hobbyists


> On Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 09:58:21PM +0800, Chen Xiao Fan wrote:
>> I think the most important thing is to open
>> up the MPLAB ICD2 protocol (programming and debugging).
>> That is the single most important hindrant for dsPIC 
>> development under Linux.
> 
> Why? There are already software and programmers and bootloaders
> for developing the dsPIC on Linux. Obviously as a 100% Linux
> user, the ICD2 is completely out of my scope. So if you have
> a minute, explain what does it bring to the table.
> 
> 
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