gnupic: Thread: Re: picp

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Rick Mann wrote:

>There's a pretty thorough document on the Microchip website about using ICSP
>to program the 18Fxx20 parts. Does this not provide sufficient information
>on programming the part?
>
>  
>
In the wide sense, yes, because when I said that it was (apparently) a 
trivial task, I had took a glimpse on that document and found it to be 
very similar to the 18fxx2's one.

Bue in the strict sense, for our task with picp, which just drive a 
PicStart Plus programmer, we have a problem that it depends on some 
information about the device, which is usually borrowed by spoofing the 
communication between mplab and the picstart plust. Currently, mplab 
6.30 don't have support to 6520 through the picstart plus, so we can't 
get that information from it.


Assuming it's timings and electrical parameters are similar, to some 
extent, to those on 18fxx2, one could attempt to hack the code to fit 
18fxx20's requirements, but that could result in bad things (tm) or 
nothing at all. I believe that either 18fxx20 support wasn't included 
yet in picstart (as far as I know), or it was deliberately excluded by 
some good reason (i.e. incompatibility).  AFAIK, the pinout is directly 
incompatible (picstart has no native support to that encapsulation), but 
I guess with an adapter, that would not be a problem. I honestly don't 
know for sure and I'm blind guessing here (I'm not a PIC programmer 
myself, so I'm not aware of  the intrinsic details)..

There are some other open-source device programmers out there, which may 
eventually support these devices, I guess it may worth the search...

Let's hope someone on the list has more complete information to help us 
here :-)

- - Alexandre


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Picp 0.6.3 beta 3 code is available at
http://home.pacbell.net/theposts/picmicro/beta

This version will program ID locations, configuration bits, and eeprom data 
embedded in a hex file when using the -wp command.

Gpicp 0.0.8 beta 2 is also available, which will now properly read 
non-program data embedded in a hex file.

Cheers,
Jeff

Picp version 0.6.7-beta2 is available at
http://home.pacbell.net/theposts/picmicro/beta

This update works with the latest PicStart Plus firmware (4.03.04). Feedback, 
good or bad, is welcome as I'd like to resolve any remaining problems and 
release the final version 0.6.7 soon. The final version will have 18F4550 
support (thanks to Christian Klippel), but I received the patch too late to 
include in beta 2.

Thanks,
Jeff