Yes Bruce I was going down that road eliminating the MAX232 until I considered the advantages of loader-free possibilities with boots. Firmware updates will be all over the map, some in the most remote areas of India. And they are religious about not spending money. So I thought eliminating loaders, like U2, would be a good trade-off for using the MAX232 (and I really like hardware serial functions HSEROUT/HSERIN). I did read Mecanique worries about internal oscillation drift, so maybe if we want to eliminate programming hardware we should just work with crystals, totally not needed for tracking a slow moving sun. Will defer until the industry matures and PICs operating crystal-free can be reliably bootloaded. It is amazing how much stuff is unexpected.

It would be great if PICs also had internal voltage regulators and internal MAX232. Maybe someday.

Thanks,
Doug