Australia Day. Burning the flag should be a SHOOT ON SITE offence, 'nuff said.

I am getting impatient waiting for my PIC programmer kit, so I started digging around on the net and found an easy to build PIC programmer. It's sitting there ready to go now, just waiting for the PIC-C Compiler to download. I found some software called PonyProg2000 for programming them that seems to be compatible. I have read the chip now (empty) without error, so we will see what happens.

I made the hardware part of it on a breadboard. I also cut up an old serial cable and made a "break out" cable to some header pins to plug straight into the bread board.

Hi-Tech PIC-C and HI-TIDE are taking ages to install... It was a 40 meg download to start with, that's OK.

8:53 PM: 

I've been mucking around for most of the day with the PICs I bought. I got impatient and made the programmer as above. So at the moment I code in PIC C using HiTIDE, Dump the C-File into Microchip's MPLAB which gives me my Assembler code (.ASM) and a compiled HEX file. Then, Using PonyProg2000 I load the HEX file onto the chip. Voila. Of course, if I had *paid* for a propper version all the steps would occur in the one suite of software. But, as I wanted it NOW and well, not like I'm going to buy $300 worth of software to "Experiment With"... I used 3 product trials...

CRW_1652	Programmer
LED Chaser	Serial "Breakout"