throbscottle
Well-Known Member
The pc is running windows 7. I think the motherboard is from gigabyte. It doesn't have a serial port. I tried winpic800 and it didn't work with the dongle. The programmer in my screen shot does work with it, unfortunately doesn't support the 16F57 I want to program! But it does let you set up the settings manually so I'll have to learn how to do that. I have read that people get very mixed results with these devices, the chip from ftdi seems to be the only one which is really reliable, unfortunately it's also expensive, not worth getting for this purpose when it is likely to not work anyway. My laptop is a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 1501, also with no serial port, running Arch Linux with a 3.8.11 kernel. It loads the driver and creates a serial port for the dongle but I can't access it, instead get an "inappropriate ioctl for device" error, so although there are several programmers for Linux I can't currently use any of them. So the best option at the moment is to put in the effort to use and understand what works.
I'm getting there slowly, not at a point where I can test if it actually does work, in spite of previous apparently good results. Some of it is trial and error, eg, the outputs of the cp2101 are active low. I don't know if this is the case with real rs232 outputs or not (which can go up to 25V + and -) If not, then that's great because I need to boost the output voltage to 5v anyway which will also invert the signal, however if so it just means I have to use software which lets me invert the outputs there. Some programs do, some don't.
So are this has cost me £1.38, the 40 pin zif socket was 82p and the dongle was 56p - everything else was free apart from the Veroboard which I already had, so if it works, great, if it doesn't work then it's been a great learning experience and I have some parts to use for something else.
If this fails I shall have to rebuild my old 400MHz pc (currently just a collection of parts) which has both serial and parallel ports and try building either type of programmer to work with that. If THAT fails, I'll resort to buying a pic-kit (and if it works I'll use it to program a pic to build a pic-kit clone!)
Actually this reminds me ("oh no", everybody groans, and Nigel is going to want to give me whack round the head) I actually have a usb-parallel printer adapter, works great on my ancient oki line printer! Would the port provided by this work with a parallel port programmer?
I'm getting there slowly, not at a point where I can test if it actually does work, in spite of previous apparently good results. Some of it is trial and error, eg, the outputs of the cp2101 are active low. I don't know if this is the case with real rs232 outputs or not (which can go up to 25V + and -) If not, then that's great because I need to boost the output voltage to 5v anyway which will also invert the signal, however if so it just means I have to use software which lets me invert the outputs there. Some programs do, some don't.
So are this has cost me £1.38, the 40 pin zif socket was 82p and the dongle was 56p - everything else was free apart from the Veroboard which I already had, so if it works, great, if it doesn't work then it's been a great learning experience and I have some parts to use for something else.
If this fails I shall have to rebuild my old 400MHz pc (currently just a collection of parts) which has both serial and parallel ports and try building either type of programmer to work with that. If THAT fails, I'll resort to buying a pic-kit (and if it works I'll use it to program a pic to build a pic-kit clone!)
Actually this reminds me ("oh no", everybody groans, and Nigel is going to want to give me whack round the head) I actually have a usb-parallel printer adapter, works great on my ancient oki line printer! Would the port provided by this work with a parallel port programmer?