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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

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.

NavinF 5y ago
> 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.
- callmemclovin 5y ago
  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.
  - NavinF 5y ago
    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 https://1bitsquared.com/products/black-magic-probe
buescher 5y ago
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.
callmemclovin 5y ago
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.

NavinF 5y ago

> 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.

callmemclovin 5y ago
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.
- NavinF 5y ago
  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 https://1bitsquared.com/products/black-magic-probe

buescher 5y ago

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.

callmemclovin 5y ago

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.