For debugging, I would recommend ICE2000 or other professional tools for beginners who doesn't have much experience on PICs. The pain on ICE2000 is you need spend extra money to buy modules everytime for new chipsets. For PIC experts, who already has lots of C code to be reused and knows a lot about PICs, both the ICD2 and PICkit2 are good toolsets for them. Most of the time, the experts just need a tool to verify the code design by set up limited break-points and watch window for variables. I personally spend very few time for debugging (I own ICE2000, ICD2 and PICkit2). Most of the time, the C code I wrote runs correct in the first shot. I think the HI-Tech C compilor also helps a lot. I may be wrong here: I spend many time thinking about my code instead debugging my code. Funny ----- Original Message ---- From: Xiaofan Chen To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public. Sent: Friday, November 2, 2007 9:00:22 AM Subject: Re: [PIC] PICkit 2 vs ICD2 On 11/2/07, Vitaliy wrote: > "Never actually use the PK2 or ICD2 as a debugger." -- > what?! Why not? I use ICD2 for debugging, very happy with it.. By the way, I do not think I wrote this in the forum post. I've used both and I do not like either of them. It is quite usable for the 16F917 I tested. I also used ICD2 last time for 12F629, a real pain to use because of the limitations. I've tried to use ICD2 with PIC24/dsPIC33 on the Explorer 16 demo board, I think it is not good, much worse compared to using J-Link on the TMS470 ARM7 MCU. Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist