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.
ICSP: In-Circuit Serial Prgramming

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

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'.

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