Using PICKit to program the SKRM?

[Digital Larry]

I've read a few posts about people programming the modules this way. I'd like to integrate support for that into SpinCAD Designer if I could.

Someone who's doing this already, could you give me a quick overview of how you do it?

The main question I have is whether the PICKit looks like a COM port to the PC.

Thanks,

DL

[slacker]

The pickit2 can program the 24LC32, you create the hex file in spinasm, then use the pickit's software to write it to the 24LC32. The pickit has command line software, so if you can make spinCAD create a hex file you can integrate support that way.
It doesn't look like a serial port to the PC.

[Digital Larry]

Thanks for the response. It's cheap enough; I suppose I can buy one even if it's not a universal solution.

Apparently, ElmGen (the open source project upon which SpinCAD Designer is based) was written to support a serial to I2C dealybobber that the original author (Andrew Kilpatrick) made using an Arduino. I've heard reports that it works on Mac as well as Windows and probably Linux also.

I'm just trying to get this as simple as possible.

[slacker]

Depending on how it produces the data to send to the serial doodad it might be possible to convert it into a hex file instead. If it saves it in a temporary file it might be as simple as adding the header and the non data parts of the hex file. I've just done the opposite for a serial to i2c interface for an FV-1 project, this allows you to send a hex file via the serial pot to a pic, this then strips out the data and sends it via i2c to the eeprom.

If the data is produced on the fly and sent to the serial port it might be trickier but the data must exist in some form somewhere in the process.

I might look into it.

[pharaohamps]

The Arduino interface for ElmGen does work OK, but you end up needing a lot of extra parts to do the job. An Arduino board is ~$30 and then you need to wire up all of the connections over to the EEPROM.

Larry, if you have a nice way to get something useful out of ElmGen or SpinCAD maybe we can talk about a little custom PCB with just the parts needed to do the I2C parts of the job? You really just need an FT232RL USB -> serial bridge, an ATMEGA328, and a couple of passive parts. Part of the charm of the Arduino / ATMEGA is that is has a hardware I2C port and does all of the nasty parts (not really that nasty) by itself. In the Arduino IDE, you just need to do Wire.send() and that's about it.

Send me a PM here and we can talk about it, but making a little fake Arduino programmer would be cheap enough.

[Digital Larry]

Hi pharaohamps, I've just purchased an Arduino USB to RS-232 thingey over here:

http://store.mp3car.com/Arduino_USB_Ser ... d-mt8y.htm which I'm hoping to be able to adapt to i2c programming purposes.

I'll report back on my findings!

DL