On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:12 PM, Matt Bennett wrote= : > The PICKIT3, ICD3 and RealICE all come from the same code base and have a > very similar API- this is to make adding new parts and maintenance easier= .. That is in terms of software. The underlying hardware of PICkit 3 is more in line with PICKit 2 (USB PIC24 replaces the 18F2550). The ICD 3 and Real ICE has PLX high speed USB and FPGA. I think this decision (to use similar API for PICkit 3) is probably good for the MPLAB developers. But it is probably part of the reason why PICkit 3 sucks, at least initially. You have a much lower end hardware trying to share the same API as the faster brother. For example, downloading firmware for a different PIC family in case of ICD 3 is quite fast, in the case of PICkit 3, it is not as fast and was error prone, at least last for quite some time after release. --=20 Xiaofan --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .