Madness, 18F2550!

[tom]

I'm very disappointed because I have a huge application which controls
solar machine and it works great and my customer is very satisfied.
Because of new features planing to add I have to migrate the whole
design to 18F. And I am stucked for almoust a month without any success.
The program is acting very strange - don't react on buttons, don't count time... But when I use bootloader from MCS everything WORKS as expected!
Of course, my customer have only ICPROG they don't use bootloader so what should I do, start to write the whole application from the beginning in C?????

[mister_e]

Well, do as you wish... but i doubt it will solve the problem.

At least make sure the Config fuses are correctly transfered from MCS to your XYZ programmer software and that your XYZ software is set to program those fuses.

I'd never trusted ICPROG and ALL freebies one anyways, and guess what? I think it's the main problem here.

When you don't use the bootloader, how do you program your PIC, In-circuit?, on a ZIFF (or else) socket? Wich programmer/interface. Is PGM tied to GND (or at very least loaded to GND)?

Did you do a 'programming check' once it's programmed?

Any schematic of your stuff? ... just in case.

EDIT: i remind Malc-C already had problem programming this PIC with software like that... no coincidence at all

EDIT #2 : ICPROG don't have the 18F2550 in it's list... at least if their wonderful website is up-to-date...

[Archangel]

Of course, my customer have only ICPROG they don't use bootloader so what should I do, start to write the whole application from the beginning in C?????

As a stopgap, you could program chips for him, until you sort this out.

[Bruce]

Have you tried the 'exact' same config fuse settings that are in your loader file
when programming it without the loader?

[tom]

That helps Bruce!
By careful comparision of every fuse programmed with and without bootloader I noticed some XINST=Extended Instruction Set Enable Bit which was dissabled in working version and enabled in non working version! In WinPicProgrammer this fuse is called "ENHCPU Extended CPU Enable". This fuse is related with some 18F specific data addressing techniques. To be sure that this fuse is my problem I reprogrammed several times exactly the same program (with other fuses the same) with XINST OFF and XINST ON and YES! With XINST ON the program is acting very strange and completely unfunctional. I try with programmer and with bootloader, symptoms are the same. So, dear friends, thanks everyone for help and write down in your notebook of 18FXXX' secrets following line:

@ __CONFIG    _CONFIG4L, _XINST_OFF_4L

cheers!