Hello guys, I thought I hadn't terrorised this forum for a while, so I will just dump some news on my latest findings.
I got a cheap JDM programmer (http://www.nbglin.com/jdm.htm). It seems to me that the zero-force sockets are the only things that cost anything on that board, the rest is a bunch of discrete components. It is also very similar to the free JDM programmer seen on many reprap pages, so one of those breadboard clones should probably do the same thing for less than the $30 I paid for this.
The origin to all this was that I wanted to try to modify the PIC source, just for the hell of it.
I found pulling the pic in and out of my cheap plastic socket on the controller board a big nono, won't last more than a dozen times or something will break :-(
So, I read on in the reprap pages and found some notes on an in-circuit programmer connector (http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/InCircuitProgramming)
They mentioned that I should get some more expensive programmer with external power.
Refusing to give up I stubbornly wired up the four wires needed and connected them between the reprap and the programmer. Of course it did not work....
So I left it 'till the next day, when I though that, ok, if my programmer cant be externally powered, how about giving the rest of the reprap circuitry a second power supply?
I quickly grabbed an old forgot-whatfor black 12V power unit from the scrap box and wired it up with a scrapped 4-pin Molex connector (its a good idea anyway to let the motors and stuff be driven not from the computer ;-)
This worked great, I can read and program the pic in-circuit with this simple scheme.
As a bonus the pic software I use (http://www.nbglin.com/download/jdm1.rar)
has the nice feature to leave the MCLR low so that the stepper motor will run in both directions.
(MCLR doubles as one of the end-stop detectors in run mode).
Wouldn't a programmer like that be useful in the reprap PCB collection???
Can someone else try if this is working?? Seems like a very cheap way to include pic-update possibilities to the coming masses!!
I also tried USB but that didn't seem to work with this programmer. Also I boot back and forth from reprap live CD to W2k for running and programming. My COM2 refuses to work at all so I never actually tried running the two connectors (programming and reprapping) together!
