> I am also new to PICs. I have been using those for only a month with
> little prior experience with electrical engineering. I started by
> building my own programmer using a PCB found in a book ("El Cheapo"
> programmer).
>
> Using this home made programmer, I realized that it was difficult to
> program a 16f84a and
> it had the type of problems you are experiencing where I got all kind
> of errors trying first to talk to the parallel ports as specific
> drivers are needed and then I had to try to power and connect the
> programmer in different order. With great difficulty, I was able to
> make it work on Linux and Windows.


Note that Myke Predko (who designed the El Cheapo)'s website has many
updates to the design found in the book (after the book was released many
parallel ports changed in design, using lower voltages, and therefore
certain changes were necessary). I build it according to the latest version
(http://www.glitchbuster.com was kind enough to explain how to modify the
PCB to fit a newer version) and had no real problems hardware wise. Myke's
software is a bit outdated, but fortunately most software that currently
exists has good support for the El Cheapo, which means you can use it to
program a wide variety of PICs. The 16F628A, however, is not one of them (I
was able to program the 16F628, the 16F877 and the 16F88, though). The El
Cheapo also has some strengths compared to most other programmers: it has a
very solid programming voltage supply, which means that it can program most
C parts (OTP), which current programmers can't handle.

I would still recommend the PICkit 2 over the El Cheapo and the JDM
programmers you can get on eBay, but this doesn't mean the El Cheapo or the
JDM are "crap". In fact, if you have the PCB, it gives you a very good
starting point for the PICmicro. And even if it is useless otherwise, you
could still use the El Cheapo to create a bootloading 16F877, or program a
16F628 for the Wisp (I have never built a wisp, but from what I read on the
list, you need a programmed 16F628/16F628A/16F648A for it).

Greetings,
Maarten Hofman.
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