I'm looking for a replacement for my old parallel port programmer. What's the difference between something like a PicKit2 and an MPLAB ICD2? Is there a significant difference between the real deal, and the chinese fake things on ebay? (Apart from the sizeable amount of change from the latter)? Oh, and do these things (and MPLAB) work on Vista? The ICD2 looks a bit more advanced than a PicKit, and the dodgy copies look like ace value. So could I possibly go wrong with one of these? Looking to do ICSP with PIC16, 18 and very possibly PIC30. But I'm not that bothered about the dsPICs.
The ICD2 supports just about every PIC you're likely to use, and as it's name suggests, is a proper in circuit debugger. The PICkit2 supports lost of PICs for programming, but only a select few for debugging, and at this stage the debugging facilities are very basic (one breakpoint etc). The cheap chinese ones are a hell of a lot slower, especially while debugging. If you're stepping through code, they can take 10s of seconds between lines of code, so it really depends on how much of a serious user you're going to be. Using it day in day out even the ICD2 gets on my nerves at being slow (I now have a RealICE which is much faster) but I'd have left my job if it was as slow as the chinese ones... I don't think Vista is supported at the moment, but the major limitation is with MPLAB rather than with the device, and from what I've heard, there isn't a big push for support to be improved at any great speed since 99% of their profit making users are still using 2000/NT/XP/98. PIC30 is a product line of dsPICs by the way
Well, MPLAB and C18 work fine-ish on Vista (MPLAB crashes on exit, if you ask it to save the workspace before it quits) but other than that it seems fine. I've since tracked down microchip's very well hidden forum, which suggests that the ICD2 and RealICE do work on Vista 32 bit. The only devices that cause real trouble are the parallel port ones which can hose your windows installation. MPLAB and the devices have absolutely no 64-bit support whatsoever, and none planned (even for the newest devices) for the foreseeable future.
I came home today to find a cheap chinese 'ICD 2.5' (whatever TF that is) waiting for me. Plug it in all excited and see what happens. Gah. Devices don't program. Turns out the ICSP cable has a high-impedance GND conductor. The ZIF sockets work though, do I can actually kind of use it. As for the debugging being slow - it's not too bad really. It takes about 1/2 second or so to step over an instruction. Slow, but not completely unusable. My only real gripe with the cheap chinese one (apart from the rather poor quality control) is that it doesn't come with a manual. Took me ages to work out how to install the drivers and how to get debugging set up and working (what with the linker scripts and all that malarky).
