John Nall wrote:
>Just as a follow-up for those of you who are eager to get the free 
>student edition, the word (on the Microchip website) is that it will be 
>posted in mid-December (kind of a Christmas gift, so to speak).   Guess 
>Xiaofan Chen has more clout with  them than I ever realized!!!  :-)  (He 
>has been pushing his local rep for a long time for the need for such a  
>thing, as I understand it from his postings.)

I am just a satisfied customers. I do not think I have the ability
to influence Microchip. It is to their business interests to do this.
Microchip's core business is to sell chips, not development tools.
However they also can not give the software for free (that will not
make HiTech, IAR, CCS and other third parties not happy). So a
stripped down edition of C30 is a good choice like C18.

I also push for quite some other things (for hobbyists only, we have
other requests as a business customers). Just two examples below.

1) to release on-chip debug protocol and MPLAB/ICD2 communication
protocol.

This seems to be difficult. I saw a thread on Microchip
forum on reverse-engineering the ICD2 debugging protocol and the
whole thread was deleted yesterday.

However it seems to me there will be alternatives to ICD2 soon
for the PIC24 and dsPIC33 which support the JTAG. 

It seems to me that there are enough people inside Microchip
who are using Mac and Linux so one day they will support debugging
under different OS. Releasing the Explorer 16 Demo board
firmware and updating the firmware to support JTAG will be
a good step.

2) to use PICkit 2 to support dsPIC
This seems quite possible and should be done next year.

Regards,
Xiaofan
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