On Mon, September 26, 2011 2:47 am, Forrest Christian wrote:
> "MPLAB IDE is already running on this machine.  It is not recommended to
> run multiple simultaneous instances of MPLAB IDE".
>
> The problem is that I am regularly writing code that talks between two
> pics - the 'master' is an 18F which has it's code in MPLAB, and the
> 'slave' generally is written in PIC-C.   And often I'm toggling between
> the two for debugging purposes.    So I really need two copies of MPLAB,
> and possibly two debuggers running, and well two of everything.   And I
> really don't want to play either the multiple machine or multiple vm
> game....
>
> So....  I'm wondering what dire things are going to happen if I ignore
> that warning - or more specifically what it's warning about.   Does
> anyone have any experience running a couple of copies of MPLAB on a
> machine?

I think the warning is largely "Microchip doesn't recommend this. It might
work, it might not. It wasn't tested, and if you find a problem and things
break, we told you not to do it. P.S. C'mon, you're an engineer. You have
to have at least one spare computer kicking around in storage or
preventing your lab bench from wobbling.  Blow the dust off and plug it
in.  It may not have the horsepower to run the latest first person
shooter, but it will debug a microcontroller just fine." Or something like
that.

The biggest problem I've heard of comes in the way of debugging- MPLAB 8.x
doesn't have a way to tell between 2 different debuggers of the same type,
and as VG pointed out, things go south really quickly.  It doesn't know
what debugger it is talking to.

MPLAB X has the ability to differentiate between debuggers based on serial
numbers (or "friendly name" if you choose to use that)- you can have
multiple projects open at the same time- I frequently do, more because I
just don't get around to closing one project before I open another- it
works pretty seamlessly.  But be warned, parts can get destroyed if MPLAB
decides to apply 5V to a 3.3V only part.

Matt Bennett

The views I express are my own, not that of my employer, a large
multinational corporation that you are familiar with.
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