On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 11:38 PM, Philip Pemberton
<piclist@philpem.me.uk> wrote:
> I'm also looking at the PICKit 3, but I've seen it get utterly panned by
> EEVBlog (and MCHP's response to EEVBlog), which criticised it for the
> LEDs being almost invisible, being slow (though MCHP say that's only the
> case for one chip), not having a command-line driver, and a few other
> issues. Does anyone know which issues Microchip have fixed in the
> current PK3 hardware rev? (MCHP seem to be staying true to form and not
> releasing a revision history for their hardware products!)

I can't remember the hardware was criticised too much except the
dimming LEDs and maybe the colour of the device. What they have fixed
so far maybe is that they have released a command line tool, so you
can use pk3 with other software than MPLAB. And what I have heard
recently is that there is an effort to make MPLAB 10 as a
multiplatform development environment, so it will be available on
Linux and Mac as well (maybe in a year?). That might be the answer to
the critics to that you cannot use pk3 under Linux (and personally I
found it as a very good answer).

But till it happens and proves itself that is good, you may be better
to stick to pk2 unless you want to program or debug new devices. If
you can't buy it from Microchip, just buy or build a clone one.

Tamas


>
> Lastly, has anyone had a play with the PIC18 Explorer demo board? The
> PK3 Explorer demo kit looks mighty tempting, though the lack of a
> prototyping board for the PICtail platform (the PICtail Plus has
> prototyping boards available) and an actual USB device port (without
> adding an extra processor module) is a bit offputting, although the
> '46J50 USB demo board isn't (too) expensive. I/O wise, it looks like an
> analog I/O has been consumed by the temperature sensor, but everything
> else is either locked in write-only mode, or can be disabled by removing
> a jumper.
>
> So I guess what I'm asking is whether I should go for a PICKit 3 (or
> even a PK2) or the full-blown ICD3, and whether it's worth getting the
> Explorer demo board as well (it'd certainly make HPC debugging work go a
> bit quicker -- I'm sick of making PCBs).
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Phil.
> piclist@philpem.me.uk
> http://www.philpem.me.uk/
> --
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printf(s=%s%s%s, q=%s%s%s%s,s,q,q,a=%s%s%s%s,q,q,q,a,a,q); }",
q="\"",s,q,q,a="\\",q,q,q,a,a,q); }
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