Matrix user forums

Hi all
sorry to post a new topic. I work in a University and we teach PIC programming in both C and assembly. We are using the rather old V2.1 boards with parallell ports. We have about 30 of these modified to give breakout 18 and 40 pin ZIF sockets such as RS 710-6697. These have given excellent service over the years and we were hoping to use some of the newer PICs such as the 16F1827 in our classes next year. I have obtained a few patches from MatrixMultimedia for PPPV3.

The strange thing is that the programmer autodetects the 16F1827 no problem and can read the memory contents but refuses to either erase the memory (it retries 10 times) or write anything (I get a fail 0 code).

One posibility is that I may have blown the chips as Vpp is C 12 V above the maximum specified 9V. However they still ID OK and reducing Vpp to 9V does not solve the problem.

Is there any debugging we can use?

Sean

Hi Sean,

Please find attached the up to date release of PPP including updates for the 16F18 devices. I have just tried one here and it is programming and running correctly. Note that this device will not currently work with the BoostC version supplied with Flowcode v4 so you must use the hitech compiler workaround instead which can be found in the articles section of the forums.
Extract the contents of the zip file into your Flowcode v4/Tools/PPP folder.

Hi Ben

thanks for the new PPP. It does not seem to give the option to use the LPT port but only the USB so I can't actually test it. Dou have a version which included LPT support?

Sean

Hello,

Ok sorry the latest version of PPP does not include support for the parallel port. What you could try is re-install the version of PPP from the website download and then simply update the .cfg files from my previous attachment.

http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/software/PPPv3.exe

If this doesn't work then the 16F88 chips may be an option for you.

Ben
sadly that's exactly what I tried previously. I will check however if the chips are OK after being given a Vpp of 13V.
I do have one recent board purchased last year so will try with that later on in the week.
Many thanks in any event
Sean

That V2 board is very old now, and sooner or later you'll hit problems with PCs not having a parallel port. I know that university finances are generally in a bad way at the moment and your department probably doesn't have much spare cash, but new USB-based hardware might be a better option.

If you want, I could discuss with our commercial team to see if there is any kind of deal we can offer for a bulk purchase of replacement kit.