The prog84 PIC Programmer: USB support

I've done some recent (as of early 2000) work on the prog84 PIC programmer and so I'm updating this web page. The new work is based on Frank Damgaard's version 2.11b11 and is called 3.0 alpha-n. Alpha releases are available via anonftp at ftp.hhhh.org:/pub/wiml. I do intend to produce a beta release and post it more widely, but this is a pretty back-burner project for me. If you download or use an alpha release, please send me mail describing whether it works and on what platform you used it.

So far, I've been concentrating on making prog84 more portable to machines which aren't necessarily PC-clones. My development platform is an Apple PowerBook G3 (running Linux); there's no general-purpose parallel IO on such a machine, so I've attached my programmer to an ActiveWire USB board, using it as a dumb parallel port. I'd also like to make it possible to run a serial-port programmer using only user-level tty ioctls, instead of the direct hardware manipulation prog84 uses now.

(If you're wondering about my choice of the ActiveWire board, it's simply the first experimenter-oriented USB product I encountered. I've also bought a USB SimmStick, and intend to write a driver for it at some point. See also my notes on the Keyspan serial adaptor.)

The old whiny version of this page still has links to the old releases of the code.

Much of the credit for prog84 should go to Frank Damgaard, who also has the most recent non-alpha version on his website.

Prog84 contributors:
  • Steve Wahl, support for Intel HEX files, etc.
  • Geoffrey Wossum, some FreeBSD patches
  • (have I missed anyone? Mail me.)
TIMELINE
1994Original version 0.9 release. Developed on Linux and NetBSD boxes on old PC-clone hardware.
1995-6Luigi Rizzo makes some fixes, brings out version 2.0.
1997This web page put up.
1999Frank Damgaard has been maintaining prog84 for some time, bringing out versions 2.1 through 2.11, integrating patches from Steve Wahl, Geoffrey Wossum, others(?).
2000Support for the USB parallel peripheral on my non-Intel box; some cleanup; version 3.0.
Page last modified: 6 July, 2000. Wim Lewis <wiml@omnigroup.com> (My home page)