2006/6/7, Phil Keller wrote:

> The Explorer 16 board is OK.  There are two major, at least what I would
> consider major, issues.

> 1- The PICTail plus interface.  If you would like to add your own
> circuit to the design you will need to make your own PICTail board.
> Microchip has no plans to sell a prototype board with the PICTail
> interface.  They do provide the Gerbers but for each of us to make our
> own prototype board with the PICTail interface seems like a major
> duplication of effort and should have been provided by Microchip.  There
> is a small proto area but no access to any signals without soldering
> directly to the pads designed for a surface mount header.

Agree on this.  It seems to me that there's no PICTail+ daughter board
from Microchip at the moment.  Making my own connection header with
2.54mm pitch is difficult too, as the prototype area seems to be too
small.


> 2-The PIC24 has dismal erase/write cycle lifetime.  Typically 1000 but
> could be as low as 100 cycles.  Yes, you can purchase additional PIM
> modules for the next 100 erase/write cycles but for a development
> environment (well actually this is a PIC24 problem not an Explorer 16
> problem) this approaches unacceptable.

I think Microchip may consider a differrent grade chip, just for
development purpose.  Something like the windowed device for the OTP
part, they can take the move to provide a development grade device
with 100,000 write/erase cycles.


Best regards,


-- 
WH Tan
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