> I agree with all the arguments. One must know how to build 
> leaf switches out of old coffee cans and resistors out of 
> lead pencils. This is not, to prove how macho one is, since 
> the girlfriend wouldn't understand anyway. This is really 
> something that self sufficient men need to do, together with 
> buying all kinds of tools and storing them in several sheds, 
> and watching 'house improvement'.

Yep, that's me. It isn't real until I understand it top to bottom and can
watch it work.

> Laughs aside (we will pick them up again soon), I designed & 
> built all my pic programmers so far (since ~1995), and I do 
> all my own development on them. Every time I saw someone buy 
> a super duper do-them-all-50,000 chips programmer so far, I 
> also saw the person discover that one of the few chips they 
> wanted to program with it had buggy support, followed by 
> interesting waiting time for the software update (is the 
> email in yet - repeated every five minutes for as long as it takes).

Been there, had that done to me. Now, I should say that I've purchased all
my programmers, but I studied the programming protocol and understood it
well for each chip. When I've had a problem with a programmer, I can email
them exactly where it is messing up. If they had been open source (non have
been so far) I could have fixed it myself.

The other side of it is that I'm totally addicted to in circuit debugging
and the details of that interface are not usually available. For the SX's,
we (the SX community) has figured it out long ago, but I guess the ICD
protocol for the PIC is still closed? In any case, I only mention ICD's
because I know I'm going to buy the company made hardware anyway. My
interest in this thread is purely educational.

> To help out people who really want to feel independent, and 
> who still have some room left in the toolshed, I attach an 
> untried but very likely functional manual pic programmer, 

Most funny! Thanks for sharing. But really, a circuit like that hooked up to
a serial port with the clock derived from a one-shot...

---
James.
 

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