Hacker News Reader

Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

Back when I was very first learning to use the USB driver for the PIC MCU I made something similar except it was even dumber, it was just one push button and one LED. I showed it to a few buddies and same thing, they started thinking of all kinds of funny use cases for it, like a USB controlled light switch or whatever.

But seriously, the PIC USB driver, super simple to use and very useful for many real useful purposes.

View on HN

If PIC programmers/debuggers didn't cost about the same as a months rent, or at least didn't use proprietary Windows-only drivers... I love PIC stuff too but jesus they make it hard to choose their stuff for hobby work.

Haven't touched PICs in a while, but PICkit seems to still be a thing. I remember getting into microcontrollers by saving pocketmoney for pickit2 when I was in school. They also now have an even cheaper option - mplab snap ~30 Eur. That's approximately same as 1-2 official Arduinos. Not exactly month's rent.

At the same time a good JTAG probe like J-Link for arm micros can cost 300-800 Eur. There are both cheap and expensive solutions for most microcontrollers.

The pickit guy was giving the other dev tools people at Microchip a run for their money for a long time, implementing the features of the fancier debuggers and more, like a simple logic analyzer.

My impression was it was basically one engineer or a very small team implementing the pickit who took the opportunity to make it a tour de force.

Recommended, if it will do what you need.

If you're a (non-commercial) hobbyist/student, there's the official Segger J-Link EDU Debug Probe for 50€, same functionality as the J-Link BASE.

> a good JTAG probe like J-Link for arm micros can cost 300-800 Eur

I’ve never understood how they stay in business. Dirt cheap SWD programmers work with pretty much any arm chips and give you all the debugging features like breakpoints over just 2 wires.

Just did a quick search for JTAG debuggers on Aliexpress, and the majority seem to be clones of Segger J-Links, so yeah... it's easy to produce the (simple) hardware and sell for cheap if you just steal the software, it's the same with Saleae Logic Analyzers.

The software (OpenOCD) is free and open source.

Alternatively you could use a programmer that doesn’t require any software and just exposes a GDB server over a tty: https://1bitsquared.com/products/black-magic-probe

True, not ideal for hobby stuff. Not sure the best hobby alt for USB stuff, seems like an opening there for something cool maybe in the Arduino realm? Could be something out there on that front, but I am not super up on that space, but I bet Sparkfun has something, those guys are awesome for hobby stuff IMO.

Yeah it's pretty easy now to build USB HID gadgets with various boards from Sparkfun/Adafruit/Arduino... even the small Digispark board based on the ATtiny85 can act as an (emulated) USB HID device :-)

The Raspberry Pi Pico is pretty easy to work with and has you covered if you need USB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com