At 03:40 PM 6/10/2010, RANDY ABERNATHY wrote:
>Hello:
>
>I am fairly new to the PIC family and have some PICs with code in 
>them, the code isn't protected, at least not according to my Melabs 
>programmer and the person from whom I received the PIC.  I want to 
>copy the code and then burn it into another PIC, possibly a 
>different PIC.  This is a newbie question for sure.

I don't have any experience with the MELABS programmer so all I can 
is suggest a couple of things.

First, and most important: Make Sure that your programmer is set up 
to work with the exact chip that you are trying to copy.

1) Your programmer software probably has somewhere that you can pick 
and choose what you are going to read and program.  For your 'C' 
chip, pretty much all you need to read and program is the program 
memory and the configuration bits.

That means that you have to tell your programmer to read both the 
program and configuration.  Check the menus to see if there is 
somewhere that you can check or change those settings.

2) When you put your chip with the program that you want to copy into 
the programmer and hit the 'Read' button, you place a copy of the 
contents of that chip into your computer's RAM.

3) If you now place a blank chip in the programmer socket, you can 
hit the 'Program' button and program that brand-new empty chip with 
what you read from the first chip.

That's pretty much all that you need to do.

Couple of things to check on first:

1) Make sure that your programmer is reading and writing the 
configuration bits.  Your brand-new PIC with a perfect copy of the 
program burned into it still won't run if the configuration bits are wrong.

2) Make sure that those new chips that you are trying to program are 
in fact brand-new and have not already been programmed with 
anything.  That particular PIC family is One Time Programmable (OTP) 
and you can generally only program them once.

If nothing seems to work, see if you can find someone with a PIC 
Start Plus programmer.  I could then give you an exact step-by-step 
procedure on how to copy your original PIC into a new one.

Hope this helps!

dwayne

-- 
Dwayne Reid   <dwayner@planet.eon.net>
Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd    Edmonton, AB, CANADA
(780) 489-3199 voice          (780) 487-6397 fax
www.trinity-electronics.com
Custom Electronics Design and Manufacturing

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