ICSP: In-Circuit Serial Programming is great

Sunday, October 19, 2008

ICSP: In-Circuit Serial Programming is great

At the beginning of my PIC journey, when I want to program *.hex file to my PIC microcontroller, I have to remove the PIC from the circuit board and place it on my PIC programmer to program the *.hex file to it and then I remove it from the programmer and put the PIC back to the circuit board. If I want to re-program the PIC, I have to repeat the process again. This process is very painful and it can cause PIC's pins broken.

Soon after I did a lot of that painful processes, I have discovered that my PIC programmer supports ICSP.

ICSP : In Circuit Serial Programming is very useful when I want to program *.hex file to PIC microcontroller while the PIC is on the circuit board. I just plug the ICSP plug to the ICSP jack on the circuit board. The ICSP jack for PIC microcontroller has a circuit like picture below. Now, I put ICSP jack to all of my PIC projects and I can easily upgade their firmware.

3 comments:

Sajitha said...: Hi,
Thanks for the info. I was also looking for a method to program my PIC using my circuit board. But I guess we need to have a sofware running on the mother board to send the hex file to the PIC over ICSP. It would be of great help if you can share this code.

Thanks,
Sajitha; December 9, 2008 at 7:39 PM
punkky said...: Hi Sajitha,
Thank you for your message. However, I am not sure about your question. Are you making a PIC Programmer? If it's YES, please search for 'PIC programmer firmware'.; December 9, 2008 at 10:26 PM
Sajitha said...: Hi,
I am using the PIC16F822 as my keypad controller for my device which runs on a blackfin board. So blackfin board is my mother board and the PIC is the daughter board. I want to program the PIC on power up of the mother board.
I would like to know if some kind of ICSP driver is availabe that can run on the motherboard to program the PIC without using a harware programmer.

Thanks
Sajitha; December 10, 2008 at 9:37 AM