RS232 Pic Programmer

Hey all,

i recently bought a JDM pic programmer that interfaces to the pc via RS232 serial. I however use a laptop (which of course has no com port). i thought i could get past this by buying a simple usb to serial port cable.

I am now seeing quite a few people saying the radio shack cable i bought is not acctualy true rs232 conversion and thus has very limited success with pic porgrammers.

does anyone have a suggestion for overcoming this hurdle? (other than using a pc with a serial port)?

What's the exact model you purchased? Any RS232 to USB adapater should work I'm not sure what could cause it not to. The easiest sollution would of course be to buy a programmer that uses a USB port nativly. There are plenty out there.

Does the laptop have a parallel port? If so you could use it but you may have to modify the programmer.

I did the reverse conversion, ie. I bought a programmer kit that required a parallel port and modified it for a serial (RS232) port.

If it doesn't have a serial port it's likley not going to have a printer port as well, though not garunteed. WEird that it doesn't have a serial port, most good laptops do, they're unabtrusive and one of the oldest standing data transmission methods still used.

You need to understand that the JDM isn't a real serial port programmer, it doesn't use the serial port at all - it just 'wiggles' the handshake lines, and uses them to create a syncronous port (just as parallel port programmers do).

So using a USB/Serial converter can have very variable results, for a start they run VERY slowly, due to the overheads of USB, and the fact that serial only does a single byte at a time.

Best solution is to get an InchWork ICD2 clone, which is a proper serial port programmer, and will work fine off a USB/Serial converter.