Help choose a PIC programmer.

In my book, if it's intentionally crippled, it automatically disqualifies the product as "decent".

I seem to remember they were open source, and all you had to do was to make a small modification to the code and then compile it. I don't have the knowledge to do so, and as long as I have JAL, I don't have any incentive to try and figure it out.

Could you expand on ICD? Does this mean that there are built-in debug registers in the chip?

I had naively assumed that the single step and breakpoint facility were achieved in some way by reprogramming the Flash memory on-the-fly, relying on the fact that even the 100,000 rewrite limit would not be exceeded.

I dunno about that. They are among the cheapest ways for hobbyists to do small projects requiring modest amounts of data storage and i/o for minimal cost.

You might need removable links or live with the restrictions. I find it useful YMMV.

Be careful what you wish for.

I favour on site mass spec and FTIR as the best tests for interesting organic molecules - which from the colours in the gas giants and their moons are almost certainly present. The big question is are they sufficiently far down the track of self organisation to count as life.

Self organising catalytic reactions are more common than is generally supposed. One of the simplest and prettiest is the BZ bromate/malonic acid/cerium mix which is so tolerant that it is demonstrable in a high school lab. Very cute behaviour when unstirred in a shallow dish.

Poeple have already done liquid logic with the BZ reaction...and they are pushing the boundaries with wet chemistry modelling of neurons.

Regards, Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:14:45 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

That is true, but if somebody wants to wire up one, then they should know about 5V logic levels, 3.3V logic levels, all that stuff, else they cannot even *use* the PIC. So if they know that, then they know about parport interface. These days it is very simple, you can google parport PC on the net, and get all the info you want. In the early days I had documentation from IBM, that was only accessible to us.

Yes, I used a switch in one case. You know about the expression 'in circuit programming'? I work exactly the opposite way: I use 'in programmer circuiting'. LOL. What that means is that I leave the PIC in my noppp programmer, and simply solder the wires to my circuit under test to it:

Na, we are probably seeded by space resistant bugs, if we are not descendents of some. Mosquitos survived on the outside of the ISS for month, the eggs came out OK. I will not go into how lawyers will survive in space here ...

Interesting.

I like

"Somebody" wrote in news:hm5kdp$ltd$1 @speranza.aioe.org:

inspection,

Pic24)

Yes, on a typical ICD enabled PIC16 part, there are two registers associated with debugger control: the ICKBUG and BIGBUG registers. ICKBUG contains the high bits of the breakpoint address and BIGBUG contains the low byte. ICKBUG also contains flags: INBUG, FREEZ and SSTEP that control single stepping and whether or not peripherals are frozen while in the debug executive. INBUG is read only and indicates if debugging is in progress. Debugging requires a minimum of one level of stack and a few locations of RAM are also reserved. For more details see the Microchip data sheet DS51242A.

No, FLASH memory (by definition) can only be erased in pages. I suppose it would be *possible* to write a monitor program that saved the rest of th page before changing the instruction at the breakpoint address but the PICs that can write their own FLASH at runtime usually have debug silicon anyway. It cant be done externally as the program counter is shared between running and as the current address when programming the chip and it is reset in between.

To get my decade-old PIC skills back in tune, I recently bought a "PIC18F4xK20 Starter Kit" (14-00807). It comes with a PICkit 2 and a pretty nice demo board--18F46K20, 64x128 OLED display, thermometer, flash, 32.768 kHz crystal oscillator, ICD and serial headers.

A pretty nice demo board overall.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I like Dr. Lovelock's approach, which works well if there is any substantial amount of live involved. "All chemistry works in either direction, releasing or absorbing energy in the process. Look for chemical compounds on the higher potential energy side of the equation. If life exists, so will an abundance of those products."

He points to Earth, which has an abundance of molecular oxygen in its atmosphere as an obvious case. That wouldn't be possible without life. It would get consumed in a natural lifeless situation here, turning into oxides of various kinds.

He recommends it isn't even necessary to visit. One can figure this out just using spectrographic analysis, where there is an atmosphere to "look through," anyway.

Likens the idea to looking around at a landscape and either seeing all the boulders near the bottom of nearby peaks or sitting at the tops of those peaks. If you see most everything in its natural condition near the bottoms, then there is nothing there rolling the boulders back up. If you see boulders at precarious positions everywhere, something or someone is putting them back there. Life.

Jon

on,

There is on-chip debug hardware; the low pin count devices don't have it, though. They need a debug adapter with a special version of the chip. They aren't expensive,

Leon

On a sunny day (Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:03:38 -0800) it happened Jon Kirwan wrote in :

Follow the link Dr. Levion's site too: to

Thanks. Downloaded, read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested!