Programming Flex (003) full board using USB

Forum related to the FLEX boards

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gagandeep
Newbie
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Aug 07, 2012 11:30 am

Programming Flex (003) full board using USB

Post by gagandeep » Wed Aug 15, 2012 12:37 pm

Hi,
I read from the manual that "The Full FLEX Base Board also natively includes an USB port that can be used for
data transfer and, much more important, as a programming interface for the onboard
dsPIC (R) DSC. This option allows to save the cost of the ICD2 programming device,
making the whole development board self-contained." , but i am not able to find out a method to program board using USB.

Please help me out.

Regards,
Gagandeep

paolo.gai
Administrator
Posts: 875
Joined: Thu Dec 07, 2006 12:11 pm

Re: Programming Flex (003) full board using USB

Post by paolo.gai » Thu Aug 16, 2012 8:41 am

Dear Gagandeep,

It's true that the hardware of the FLEX Full allows for the dsPIC onboard to be programmed through the onboard PIC18.

But unfortunately in practice the programmer firmware for the PIC18 is not available.

We worked on it a few years ago aiming for the integration with MPLAB IDE (the HW producer also signed an NDA with Microchip on the MPLAB API!), but at the end we discovered that the document we had were not enough to make it working. Now with MPLAB X everything changed again, but we did not plan to implement it (Maybe soon or later we'll start a project with the local university...)

At this point I guesss the best thing should be to implement just a standalone programmer for the PIC18 (but we did not restart our work in this direction yet).

If you want to get further on this we can probably give you more details...

Regards,

Paolo

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