>
> I bought Myke Predko's book, and got the El Cheapo PCB with it. I've been carefully collecting all the correct parts for it since my reading makes me think that a majority of problems people have with the El Cheapo (or anything else) is from substituting parts, failure to read/follow directions, and poor construction. I've built the whole board except for installing the sockets. What I would like to do is use a single 40 pin wide ZIF socket (I have a nice 3M sitting here) and I want to know if this modification is worth doing (ie is it more complex than it's worth)? Also I'd like instructions, pictures, diagrams etc. on doing this modification if anyone has them. I'd really appreciate this. I do know that Randy at Glitchbuster (great guy BTW, I heartily endorse his business for anyone that wants to get parts) has modded El Cheapo's to use 2 ZIF sockets, a 40 and an 18 pin. I wonder why you can't go all the way and just use one 40 pin ZIF. I'm not afraid to cut traces and r!
 un!
>   wires. In fact I wondered about cutting traces to the 14 or 18 pin sockets and using them for DIP switches, if necessary, to select which size PIC you are putting into the ZIF 40.
>   
On mine I soldered in a 40-pin socket to plug the ZIF into so I could 
reuse it later. I then placed a row of header pins on each side with 
each pin connected to the adjacent socket pin. I used jumper wires to 
configure it on the fly depending on what I wanted to program.

Very low tech, but it worked. Because of the limitations already 
mentioned in other posts I eventually bought a PicKit 2 and am really 
happy with it. The El-Cheapo was just too limiting in the supported devices.




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