Ah, I would agree, except these are a few relatively technical "special 
customers", and we're talking about a handful of boards here per design. 
  And I've already done the ridic MPLAB + ICD2 install for them.  For 
less technical / larger pool of customers this wouldn't fly.  Am about 
to get a semicustom bootloader going (run over USB) for the wider audience.

J

Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Jesse Lackey wrote:
> 
>>and it is nice to give a cable to clients here and there, to program the
>>board you made for them with an ICD2 you told them to buy for updates
>>down the road / in the field.
> 
> 
> This may sound like a self-serving suggestion, but you really don't want to
> use a ICD2 for field upgrades, especially for customers to use themselves.
> The chances of a screwup and resulting phone call when they try to
> clickety-click their way thru MPLAB alone make this a bad idea.  But worse
> is that the ICD2 is not a production programmer, which Microchip is actually
> careful to point out.  Do it right and get a real production programmer that
> can be run from a dedicated program that can have all its parameters passed
> on the command line.  That allows you to wrap the programming operation into
> a larger program, or give them a single BAT file to run that just does the
> programming.
> 
> Personally I think my ProProg (http://www.embedinc.com/proprog) production
> programmer is a good choice for this task, although there are probably
> others out there.  At 1/3 the price of the Microchip PM3 and a lot less
> clunky, I think it's a good deal too.
> 
> 
> ********************************************************************
> Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products
> (978) 742-9014.  Gold level PIC consultants since 2000.
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