Customer Reviews

PIC Programmer & Experimenter Kit

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is actually a Velleman board. It worked great with my Dell D610, but would not work with my Dell D600. I didn't try it on a desktop, it would probably have worked fine there as well. Also, the Amazon picture is the wrong part, though the customer supplied picture is correct (thanks!).

It has good software and good support for LOTS of different PIC chips, and is straightforward to use. Easy to build and well documented, though the toggle switch needs a little breaking in.

Good board for initial learning, and continues to work fine when you just use it as a programmer. It does not include the C compilers, or MPLab, but those are easy enough to get and install.

I'd recommend it if you are learning, so long as the price stays low, though with the caveat that it won't work with all serial ports, and won't work with any USB to Serial adapters. If you know what you are doing and just want a dedicated programmer, there are probably other better choices out there.

So I'm going to keep this short, since my review is mainly based off the fact that this card cannot use a Serial to USB adapter. I didn't see the small comment made by the company that it doesn't allow the the conversion to take place, making it extremely difficult to use on a laptop or most modern computers without buying a Serial PCI card. Of course it's my fault that I didn't read everything on the product page before the purchase, but I wanted to warn others so they don't make the same mistake I did.