> Sounds promising - it's flash programmable and that's a big plus 
> in my book. Is
> the PICDEM USB board totally essential for prototyping, would you say?
its not vital (i didn't use one myself), but its very handy to have a known good board  to help diagnose if its the software or hardware that is broken. OTOH the picdem FS usb has the pic in a TQFP package so blowing it would be rather a pita to fix.

one nice thing about the USB pics is that they are very self contained, all you need in the way of hardware is the pic, the crystal and a few resistors and capacitors.

some people seem to have had issues with the very cut down 2450/4450, unless you really need to shave down unit cost i'd stick with the more estabilished and powerfull 2455/2550/4455/4550 group.

if powering off usb make sure you have a resistor to drain your decoupling caps on poweroff or you are likely to have problems if you plug it back in soon after unplugging it (at least that has been my experiance), i also had to resort to usign a resistor/capactitor network to stop the max662 i had on my board (i needed a 12V rail for the project i was designing) causing too much noise for the pic to power up.

i've had usb pics running on a generic uni micro board/breakout board (though that one was tempremental), a breadboard, a RS dil protyping board and a custom pcb without too much difficulty.


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