Quote Originally Posted by mister_e View Post

If it's for PIC and you need to real cheap ISP programmer... then you're out of luck... none of them seems to work these days. However... if you still want to build your own... then Google search... p16pro40, JDM, El Cheapo, Taits, Tafe should be more than enough to begin... and waste some hair.
I think its wrong to generalize with the above list; I agree the JDMs (and variants) are not very reliable, to say the least; not to mention the Vpp-before-Vdd issues. However, I have had excellent results with parallel port based programmer(s). I have a generic one that works great, as also an original Epic that with a slight modification, has been working wonderfully. So much so that I have never (till now, at least) been tempted to switch over to a USB programmer.

Regards,

Anand