I bought a PICKIT3 In Circuit Programmer unit and a dev board, but that was only for 40 pins PIC chips and I also want to use 28 pins PIC chips, for smaller designs that do not need so many pins. I looked in several shops but could not find anything that would fit my needs, so I decided to design and build one myself. It is not that hard, there are lot of example designs and after looking at them I had a good idea of what I wanted. So after one night designing and two nights soldering, I was finally able to test my design. I works like a charm.
It has a 40 pins ZIF socket and a 28 pins ZIF and all programming lines, onboard LED and switch are shared by both sockets, and a reset button that is shared by both sockets, but every socket has its own crystal oscillator circuit. It has a USB power supply, but during programming the power comes from the PICKIT3 device. It has a power indicator led, and two header rows of ground and plus 5 volt, to power devices you want to connect. I put header pins beside both sockets (both sides) so that every pin of the PIC processor is available to devices you want to connect. The onboard led is on pin RA0 and the switch is on port RE2 with a pullup. Both led and switch are connected to the PIC with a jumper so they can be disconnected if they are in the way.
There is one big restriction, you can only have ONE chip on the board, never two at the same time because the pins are hardwired together.
The board also has both the TX and RX lines (and Ground) on a header so you can connect it to a serial port using an TTL to RS232 cable. The crystals of the oscillator circuit are placed in a header pin socket so they can be replaced easily, I use 4 Mhz crystals (just like the original dev board), but you can choose anything that fits your needs and matches with the PIC processors.
I use MPLAB as a development suite and I can connect MPLAB with the PICKIT3 adapter to this board, edit my ‘C’ source code and upload it to the PIC processor on my dev board with just one click. This makes PIC processor development nice and easy.
