PIC 18F4550 and MAC OS X

[PJALM]

Has anyone had any experience using the USB PICs with Mac OS X?

[vacpress]

i was wondering about that also. i am hoping to make a cross-platform product, and have very little practical mac hardware experience...

anyone know? programming and stuff isnt as important as the ability for a mac to detect the hardware and use it (hid or usb to rs232 or otherwise?)

[vacpress]

at the very least...

i searched on mac os and HID... mac os has some sort of HID, but how compatible it is, I dont know... I really do wish i had a compact, older osx machine.... eventually...

i wonder

[PJALM]

I have managed to find the software for the Microchip PicKit2 Programmer as well as a USB bootloader for Mac OS X. I have tested a few sample HID projects which all seem to work natively with need of any drivers but still do not know how to write software for Mac OS X to work with a PIC.

Most likely I will do the programming with RealBasic since it will compile for Mac, Windows and Linux.

If anyone has or knows of any samples for programming in either Mac OS X or RealBasic, I would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks

[vacpress]

search the board. i remember recently seeing someone having converted the USBDEMO program into realbasic, i think. noone seemed interested at the time, but it piqued my interest. unfortunately i have no mac, but i want to know as much as possible about making it cross platform, or at least considering portability.

please keep the board informed, even if no one seems interested!

[wfvisser]

I've been developing a mac OS X based PIC development environment that may work for your application. It is proceeding quite well and I am intending to release it as shareware in the near future (current planning is within the next 2 months). It supports nearly all 12-bit, 14-bit and 16-bit core PIC's, including those with USB-modules. The software also features an integrated assembler/disassembler for these chips but no higher-level languages like basic at this point.
With respect to hardware, I am currently using it with a homemade programmer (based on the once-popular mac based PIC programmer by Francis Deck, but improved to support more chips) connected to the USB port via an FTDI USB-serial chip of which I had a number lying around, which works well albeit not particularly fast. My plan is to include support for a number of the popular more modern programmers available (PICkit, wisp628, etc) in the next version of the software. I will also publish full instructions chematic/PCB etc. of the programmer I am using.

Wouter.