Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Stef Mientki wrote:
>   
>> Interesting to see that I've chosen
>> the opposite approach:
>> the PC-program is very general and doesn't contain any intelligence,
>> all the intelligence (as far as possible) is put in the PIC that
>> controls the programmer.
>>     
>
> You are either going to need a very big PIC to hold all the programming
> algorithms and higher level information, or your programmer is going to be
> ghastly slow.  There is a lot of PIC-specific data that has to be kept
> somewhere, let alone acted upon.
>   
I think I didn't declare what I see as "intelligence" ;-)
In the PC program I use an inifile,
which either be edited in the program or just with a plain text editor.
This inifile contains for each chip the 
number/ID/sizes/programming-algoritme-number.
The programming-algortime-number is just a number,
which is translated in the PIC to the different algoritms.
So still yields, the PIC user can implement anything he likes,
by just writing a program in his favorite PIC language.
> Most PIC users don't know from programming algorithms and don't really want
> to deal with them.  Even for those that do, the existence of higher level
> logic on the PC doesn't proclude them from implementing their own
> algorithms.
>   
In the past I was asked several times,
to implement the algoritm for xxx or yyy,
because the asker couldn't deal with the higher language on the PC,
as I'm doing this all in my spare time,
I thought this would be the perfect solution,
at least for me ;-)

>   
>> So based on the above experience, I simply try all plausible
>> datawords,
>> until the chip is fully erased.
>>     
>
> And how long does it take if it starts out with 0, goes up sequentially, and
> 3FFFh is eventually found to be the right answer?
>   
3 plausible datawords, an intelligent checking algortime,
that'll be for an 8k memory size about 2*0.1 msec extra.
Well I think I can afford that ;-)

cheers,
Stef
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