> -------- Original Message -------- > From: "David Segonds" > > - Home made parallel programmer are crap and you can find good working > programmer supporting many chips out there. Have to disagree with this... When I started with PICs a few years ago, I also built a few of the different parallel-port and seral-port programmers out there. Many are crap, but I've had excellent results with my homemade Tait programmer. So much so that I re-built it in a nicer-laid out PCB a year ago and still use it. The problem will be that they support a narrow range of PICs, and you'll have problems programming the F872A, F628A, etc as you noticed. Ramzi, Whereas I'm not familiar with the ProPic2 or Winpic800, I noticed that most of these have a mode where you individually turn on/off each line (PGD, MCLR, etc) so that you can test it's functionality with a multimeter. Have you tried this? This will help you narrow down the parts of the system that has the problem -- the software, the drivers, the port settings, the programmer, the PIC, or perhaps some interconnect wiring. Look at "icprog" software (http://www.ic-prog.com/) which I know has this test capability. Also check the voltage at MCLR to make sure it is within the correct value. Cheers, -Neil. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist