Hi Skip,

Thank you for giving your blessing to those of us who are brave/crazy in this way. I’ve wanted to do this for some time but didn’t want to step on your (or Lee’s) toes.

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Would you mind answering a couple questions for me?

1.?????? How did you guys program your PICs? Did you do it in a stand-alone programmer before soldering to the PCB, or did you do it via the RS232 serial port on the Xcat?

2.?????? Regarding the Xcat firmware, xcat_v033/xcat.hex, if I wanted to program it in my standalone programmer before soldering, would I use ‘Standard/Extended Intel HEX (*.hex, *.mcs)’ whose checksum comes to 001EA2F4, or force it to read in Binary whose checksum is 000CF1CF? I don’t want to do it incorrectly and not find out until the PIC is soldered in place.

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FYI, my programmer is a Phyton ChipProg-40.

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I like ExpressPCB and that’s what I used to lay out my Xcat ‘clone’ boards. If it works, and I expect it will, I’ll have some spares available if anyone is interested in obtaining them (at my cost) and using them to assemble their own. I’ll also be happy to upload the ExpressPCB .sch and .pcb files to the file section of this group, if you give that your blessing, Skip. I’d be willing to provide programmed PICs for those who are interested, as well as the other parts, but only with your blessing, Skip.

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73,

Brad KB9BPF

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