On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Bob Axtell wrote: > The "official" PICKIT3 from MC never worked for me. I have an ICD3 that > works fine, but I need a backup. > I decided to buy a pickit3 clone from SURE ELECTRONICS in China, on EBAY. I saw a teardown/review of this device a while back which showed that Sure cut quite a number of corners on this device -- it is not a direct clone of the PicKit 3. That said, I have not seen any reports of problems with this clone either. What I do wonder, though, is why there are so few PicKit 3 clones, and almost no homebrew versions. Although the Sure clone has been out for a while now, it was the only PicKit 3 clone available until fairly recently. Thus far I have only seen one homebrew PicKit 3 build documented on the web. This is compared to countless numbers of PicKit 2 clones. I had always thought there was something that made the PicKit 3 difficult/expensive to build (such as using a CPLD or FPGA) but upon reading the homebrew build -- and then actually downloading and reading the MicroChip documentation -- I noticed that there really is nothing at all special about it. I am well aware that the PicKit 3 was hated by those familiar with the PicKit 2, so that is clearly part of it. I am also guessing that people who had not migrated to Mplab/X or parts that cannot be programmed with the PicKit 2 simply had no need for it. I'm still in the dark ages with my ICD2, but I have gotten very spoiled by all the *very* cheap dev tools for ARM, MSP430, etc. Although I have never actually fried a programming board, I am at the point where I really would never want just one board if I was doing any kind of serious development, and even at $30, multiple PK3 boards adds up. -p. --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .