On Mon, 2014-08-18 at 02:57 -0400, Neil wrote:

> Are any of you really using an ICD to its full intent and can say that=20
> it's useful?

I love my ICD3 to death.  Now, in most cases, it is pretty similar to
the PICkit 3, and as a hobbyist, "only a couple hundred bucks" is kind
of a big deal, but well worth it.  On large memory parts it is
dramatically faster than the PICkit, although on smaller parts the
difference is hard to detect.

Reserving two pins is kind of frustrating on some parts, tho.  Seems
like most of the DIP dsPICs use the only I2C/SPI pins as the programming
pins.

The comments like "walking round a strange house at night
without lights" are right on target, even more so with MPLAB-X.  And the
extra speed of the ICD is kind of helpful when debugging.  When you are
programming the difference between 10 and 15 seconds isn't a big deal,
but when you hover over a variable, waiting for the popup can be
annoying.  That happens a lot faster with the ICD. (In case you haven't
used MPLAB-X much, if you are debugging, the variable's value will show
in a popup when you hover over the variable in your source, and if it is
a structure, lots of details of the structure will show up.)

I don't much care for the RJ12 connector, but making up a cable solves
that problem more or less permanently.  I usually put a PICkit connector
on my project and with the cable I can use one or the other
interchangeably.  For a lot of my projects I have a "Red" and "Blue"
configuration so I can grab whichever debugger happens to be handy at
the time.  I have had cases involving multiple PICs and MPLAB-X handles
two projects just fine.

So yeah, with recent tools the ICD3 is indispensable.

--McD





--=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
.