ECE101 – Basic Electrical and Computer Engineering

Programming your PIC without a demo board is a straightforward task, when you know what you’re doing (aren’t they all?). With the proper hardware, setting up your programmer should take almost no time at all. To do this, you will need two data sheets; the data sheet for the PICkit 2 and the data sheet for the PIC you plan on programming.

First, you need the proper hardware. This includes:

• The PICkit2 Programmer
• Two 6 position .100″ pitch male headers (Found at Digi-Key here)
• 6 position cable (an IDE cable works though its pitch is too narrow to be pretty)
• Breadboard with .100″ pitch holes. I believe this is standard.

But, wait, doesn’t the PICkit 2 data sheet show some resistors, capacitors, and even a diode? Yes, yes it does. However, those are all isolation circuitry. You only need those parts when you’re going to be putting other circuitry on the pins used for programming. If you aren’t going to use those pins for I/O, just connect them directly to the header without any additional circuitry. If so, follow the directions on the data sheet for the PICkit 2. From personal experience, the values used are very rough, so if you don’t have them on hand, use the closest you have and it will probably work. And, whatever you do, do not AC couple the Data or Clock programming lines to ground with a capacitor. Seems like common sense, but I was trying to decouple a node that I was sharing with the Clock and didn’t think things through. Don’t imitate my mistakes.

Second, find the proper pins on your PIC to attach to. Using Figure 3.1 from the PICkit 2 data sheet, you can see what signals are on each pin of the PICkit 2. Of the six pins, five are used. Ground (or VSS) and VDD are straightforward enough. VPP is a high voltage programming line which goes up to 12 volts to tell the microcontroller that it is being programmed. Then, the important pins are the Data and Clock lines.

The Clock line on the PIC’s data sheet will be denoted either by ICSPCLK (In Circuit Serial Programming CLocK) or PGC (ProGramming Clock). Again, make sure that there is not a capacitive load on this line or you will not be able to program your PIC.

The Data line on the PIC’s data sheet will be denoted either by ICSPDAT (In Circuit Serial Programming DATa) or PGD (ProGramming Data). This also needs to be free of a capacitive load.

All you need to do is to wire the five active lines to five consecutive, free rows on your breadboard and you’ll be able to attach your male header easily to the board and then to the PICkit 2 programmer. Using the software is covered in another tutorial. Then, if you have multiple PICs you need to program, you can switch between the different PICs with ease.

See? Quite straightforward. All the information is in the data sheets but I hope I helped make them more intelligible and saved you some time scouring them for the important information.