How to go forward?

[TheMadMan]

Hi all
A very kind soul made my day!!!!
He <B>GAVE</B> me a serial in circuit programmer. <B>FREE</B>.
Has a serial connecter and the output is a 6 wire telephone plug which takes the signal to any one of a number (3 at the moment) of small boards, an 8 pin, a 14/16/18 pin and a 40 pin unit. All I have to do is populate the boards with an ic holder and a bunch of header pins and make up cables appropriate to each.
The 40 pin unit is actually a full on project board, own voltage regulator, crystal, reset button, power led and <B>ALL</B> the ports are taken to header pins via a current limiting resistors. Theres even place for screw type connectors if needed. Very neat even if I say so myself!

All I have to do now is re-create the boards on Eagle so that I can make up some more as and when I need them.

Talking about Eagle takes me to my "electronics" computer. I've loaded so many gui's, compilers and all sorts of other things lately looking for a comination that will work for me, I think I've given the thing a nervous breakdown. So, guess who will be nuking a hard drive and getting a fresh Win2KPro installation done Friday nite.

It goes without saying that PICBasic Pro will be in there somewhere, the question is "What Else Is Needed?"

<B><U>MicroCode Studio : Cost 150 UK Pounds (ZAR 2250 approx) </U></B> Cant get the "Case" statement to work properly. If there is a bug in the demo, who's to say its not present in the (costly) purchased installation.

<B><U> MPLAB : Cost FREE </U></B> Seeing as it is the one that Microchip themselves have put out and is free, this seems like the most promising option. The PICBasicPro site also has what seems like a pretty good instruction sheet on how to get PBP integrated into MPLAB. There also seems to be a whole bunch of training/tutorial stuff (hav'nt checked it out yet!)

<B><U>I C Prog : Cost FREE </U></B> Seems to be aimed at the people who are into very low level programing. Way beyond where I am at the moment - maybe in the future if I really become "geeky" about the whole thing.

So! Once I've done the box re-install, download the latest stable MPLAB and get it working with PBP. I have a PIC12 around somewhere so we'll try flashing a LED. I think that would be the "Hello World" type program to start with.

To all the people who gave advice and comment, a big thanks. Really appreciated it.

All the best

[mister_e]

mm MicroCode Studio is not as this expensive, ~30 pounds
http://www.mecanique.co.uk/code-studio/index.html

There's a free version available too. Basically MicroCode Studio Plus just add the Bootloader firmwares and ICD capability that The free version don't have. So you can buy it later without any problem

PBP demo is available bellow
http://www.melabs.com/pbpdemo.htm

Hey.. this install MicroCode studio as well... woohoo. Ok a bit limited in the PIC model and code size, but it's free and this be more than enough to start to play with.

Full version is listed @ 249.95 USD on Melabs Website, you might look at their distributor list
http://www.melabs.com/purchase.htm#Distributors

MPLAB or MicroCodeStudio? well, for me MicroCode Studio do all i need for now, but in some occasion i may use some MPLAB features. I find easier to surf in my code using MicroCode than with MPLAB, but it's me...

Short history PBP is the compiler, while MicroCode and MPLAB are the code editor + some freebies here and there.

Happy coding.