You can buy the Microchip PICKit2 programmer from the microchip webiste. Here is a very low cost serial port programmer by JDM for the PIC16F84A (I tested it and it works fine). Belive me – its worth investing in this programmer and you can program a wide range of PIC controllers with the programmer and it is USB compatible. For those who don’t have serial port, you can buy a PICKIT2 programmer from Microchip. Here, I will point out a good working circuit which works with the serial port. So, if you are going to use the USB port, you need a serial to USB converter chip. It is designed to take data from the serial port of the computer. The PIC16F84A is compatible with the serial port of our computer (You can find it in desktop computers or old laptops – a blue colored 9 pin connector).
#Mplab compatible usb pic programmer how to
Now, here don’t worry about how to send the serial programming clock and data – there are a dozen available applications that can do this for you. RB7(pin 13) is used for serial programming dataĪs soon as you connect the MCLR pin to 13 volts, the controller “knows” that its going to receive serial programming clock via RB6 and serial programming data via RB7.RB6(pin 12) is used for serial programming clock.Connect the MCLR(4th pin) pin to 13 volts.
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So, whats the big deal about programming? It just this simple – these are the steps to program the controller: As you all know(If you have read the post about getting started with PIC16F84A) the port B pins RB6 and RB7 along with the MCLR pin will be used to program the controller(To quote again, RB6 is pin 12, RB7 is pin 13 and MCLR is pin 4 of the microcontroller). Having known about the architecture of the PIC16F84A, lets dive into learning how to actually program the controller.