Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
That depends upon what YOU want to do....whether you want a pure programmer, versus a programmer plus a built-in tutorial board.
PICkit2 is a programmer.
Junebug is a programmer with a built-in experimentor board for the PIC 16F88 & 18F1320 µC's.
PICkit2 can program 5V and 3.3V PIC's
As standard, Junebug can only program 5V PIC's.
If you are just getting interested in PIC's and want to explore the options without spending a wad of cash, Bill's Junebug may be the most cost-effective, since it has the basic 5V programmer and a tutorial board combined...for two families of the PIC range...the 16F and 18F.
The Starter PICkit2 kit @ $35 comes bundled with the LPC (Low Pin Count) Demo Board, which is suitable for 20, 14 & 8 pin MCU's. You have the Demo Board with the ability to swap in some Low & Mid-Range MCU's, but not the more common 18 pin devices.
The Debug-Express PICkit2 kit @ $55 comes bundled with a 44 Pin SMT PIC16F887 MCU and you have no possibility to swap it out for another chip.
OK, both options (PICkit2/Junebug) are capable of programming most of the popular range of PIC's available, but only one has the built-in facility to develop fully interactive programs from the hardware supplied as standard.
I'm not trying to influence anyone here, I have a genuine PICkit2, a Velleman K8048, a DIY Feng3 JDM board etc. but no Junebug (as yet).
Weigh up exactly what you want to achieve, what the programmer/dev board can provide to aid you, and what you wish to spend...in that order.
They will work with any compiler if the vendor has taken the time/effort to produce the symbolic info MPLAB requires to debug.
If you do not want to debug (program only) the requirements on the compiler are less complex but it still must produce the required output files. See compiler verdor for details on compatiablility.
Some compiler suppliers have the own IDE to use in place of MPLAB.
If you want free C you can use the student version of the Microchip C18 compiler for the 18F family of chips.
For under $100 you can buy the BoostC compiler which is a good tool.
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