I'm having a weird issue.  I'm a bit new to PICs.  I've been using the
olimex dev board from sparkfun with a PIC16F88.

=20

The first time, getting anything working took a while.  I had to find a
burn program that would work with the JDM programmer and figure out what
jumpers, etc.  But, in the end, I loaded the screamer bootloader, which
has been working flawlessly ever since.

=20

Fast forward 100 or so burns (all with the bootloader.)  Last night,
suddenly I noticed that some of my LED output code was acting funny.   A
few burns shortly thereafter, the PIC stopped responding to the
bootloader.  I thought that was odd, so I fired up ICProg again (what I
used originally) and tried re-burning the bootloader.  Some writes and
verifies later, I noticed some bits were losing their ability to store
data.  So, I guess that's how PICs die.

=20

So, no biggie, I figure.  I got a tube of 25 PIC16F88s from digikey a
month ago, guess I better pop one out and drop it in.  So, I remove the
old chip, put the new chip in, and hit "program" in ICProg.  On the old
chip, burns took ~30 minutes for a complete burn, but suddenly it
"finished burning" in ~30 seconds.  Seemed odd, so I verified, and, sure
enough, all zeroes.  I tried a few different chips from the batch, all
of which had the same results.  I then put the dead chip back in and
tried burning to that, and it was, with the same configuration, able to
write and read from it (still with the same dead bits as before.)

=20

So, something's very odd.  Is it possible I got a bunk batch of
PIC16F88s from digikey?  Is there something special I'm supposed to do
to the chip before you can burn it for the first time?  I'm incredibly
confused...

=20

-David

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