On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Byron Jeff wr= ote: > On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 12:55:36PM -0500, PICdude wrote: >> I'm using the 16F1936 a lot nowadays, so that would be nice to see... >> should you make it a commercial product, that is. > >> > >> Curious... since you're developing a product, why not use Microchip's >> MCP2200? > > I'm not developing a product. I'm just trying to continue to support a > hobbyist community that have been using programmers like my Trivial LVP > Pic programmer over the years. > > With the death of parallel ports, and to a large extent serial ports on P= Cs, > there's no out of the box interface that can be driven in software on a P= C. > > So this is my latest effort in the continual quest to find a way out of t= he > catch-22 of needing a programmer to program a PIC with a bootloader, so > that a programmer is not required for development. And finding a way to d= o > it with off the shelf components, which is why the MCP2200 isn't on my > radar. Also it doesn't come in DIP, which most hobbyist still need to get > started. Finally I'm unsure if there is a specific Linux driver for the > chip. > The FTDI cable (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9717) has bitbang mode usable with libfti (libftdi.sf.net) http://www.intra2net.com/en/developer/libftdi/ This gives you power, ground, and four pins of general purpose I/O. You can write multiple I/O states and the chip will clock them out using the async baudrate clock. So it is not as slow as you might expect, since you can clock a lot of transitions in one USB transfer. It has been one of my want-to-do projects to write a LVP PIC programmer that uses this cable, probably adapting one of the other bit-twiddling PIC programmers to do so. Acually, a bit-twiddling programmer could have backends for parallel port, this cable, bus pirate, goodFET, the FTDI-based JTAGger tools, Arduino etc. The FTDI cable is useful for async serial too. PS. The MCP2200 uses standard ACM driver which is stock in Linux for some time now. Regards, Mark markrages@gmail --=20 Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markrages@midwesttelecine.com --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .