Some problems, some progress

I ran into a few unexpected problems and also made a little bit of progress.

First, on the JDM programmer, I asked some questions and got a few answers on the Usbpicprog Sourceforge forums. The guy who answered said that he could not get his JDM to work at all, also that it could not detect his PIC at all. This is exactly what I experienced as well. I had another look and realized that the CTS line of the RS232 port will never be pulled below 0V by this circuit, thus the computer cannot read any information from the PIC. It also seems that the ciruit I referred to at http://www.jdm.homepage.dk/newpics.htm is actually called the JDM2. I'm not exactly sure, but I think that makes this one the JDM1. Maybe it is better to build that one. Maybe the best position to be in is to have somebody else who can program in the first boot loader for you!

Secondly, I am really having problems getting into programming this PIC. It seems a lot more diffucult than I expected. The admins of the usbpicprog project seem to use Linux only, using Piklab to drive the MPLAB C18 compiler. It took me a long time to find out that some command line utilities of Piklab runs on Windows, but not the main GUI application you need. So I downloaded the MPLAB IDE and I'm trying to set up a project with that. I finally succeeded to the point that it builds, but the hex file I'm getting looks a lot different from the one distributed by the usbpicprog project. There is a lot I don't understand, I'll just have to read, read read!

I also continued working on my usbpicprog veroboard a little bit. I fitted the 3 LED's. Only after started I discovered that there is now a Hardware version 3, so I must be sure to work from this diagram from now on. I did not see a parts list (suppose it must be somewhere so I made it like this:
LED1 = Red
LED2 = Green
LED3 = Yellow

I found that LED1 comes on when you remove the one jumper to make it boot in boot mode. The new circuit says 470 ohm resistors. I did not have, so I used 560 ohms, the LED's are bright enough and it saves milliamps!