I've been looking for a good development board to be able to do proof of 
concept designs on.  So far I haven't been able to find any which meet 
my needs - and before I just give up and build one myself I figured I'd 
ask the list.

Mainly I'm talking simply about a 16f877 (or similar - just need a PIC 
with a reasonable clock speed and most of the peripherals - something 
else is ok) compatible socket on a board with a crystal oscillator and a 
ICD connector with simple connectivity to an RJ11 jack, and possibly a 
7805 or similar.   Push buttons, Pots, LCD, RS232 transciever, etc. etc. 
etc. are nice, but a lot of the boards that have them have the 
irritating property that they are hardwired to the PIC and require 
slicing of PCB Traces and careful soldering iron work to extract those 
signals when you need them for something other than the board's concept 
of what they should be used for.  So, if the board has those addons, I 
need them to be easily disconnectable/reconnectable.

I also need to be able to use this easily with a solderless breadboard.  
A lot of the time I'm reverse engineering something this circuit will be 
working with so I have to be able to be flexible at the point in the 
design this will be used.  This board is going to be used during the 
proof of concept design phase so it has to be able to be rapidly 
changable circuit-wise.   A solder-area isn't what I call rapidly 
changable.  I'd normally just throw the entire PIC and everything on the 
breadboard and not bother, but at 20Mhz, the breadboard isn't all that 
great to get a XTAL to work reliably - and I've had issues with the ICD 
stuff as well.

I'm assuming someone out there has built something like this....  I'm 
pretty flexible on what the board will/won't do, other than the overall 
concept of something you can actually breadboard a fairly large circuit 
with and that the basics of getting a PIC's clock running and ICD need 
to be taken care of.

-forrest
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