gnupic: Thread: PIC24/dsPIC33 Explorer 16 Development Board

Just read this:
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/51589a.pdf
Explorer 16 Development Board User's Guide

At US$130, this may be a bit expensive for the hobbyists.
Anyway, this is a higher-end demo boards with many features.

One interesting thing is that the provision of the 
18LF4550 connection to the PIC24/dsPIC33 SPI/JTAG/ICSP.
(* Hardware support only; firmware support for SPI(tm), 
JTAG and ICSP(tm) via USB are not available at this time.)
Hopefully Microchip will provide an open firmware so
that possible cheap JTAG programmer and debugger can
be developed. It seems that they are reluctant to open
the programming/debugging specification of ICD2.

The other interesting thing is that PICkit 2 connector is 
provided for future support of PIC24/dsPIC33 ICSP programming.

Regards,
Xiaofan