The Bus Pirate PIC 24F programmer will now successfully erase a PIC 24F and read the chip ID. In the future this could be a handy way to unbrick one Bus Pirate with another. Our goal is to make all Dangerous Prototypes projects repairable via a Bus Pirate programmer.
We couldn’t get the commands in the programming specification to work, even though everything looked perfect on a logic analyzer. Eventually we had to sniff the ICSP pins while we erased the chip with an ICD2. The actual commands were way off from our understanding of the datasheet. The erase operation seems to included an undocumented command.
A test programmer application should be finished very soon. Then we’ll add support for other 3.3volt PICs. The 18F24J50 in the Logic Sniffer is our next target.
We still have one of Ril3y’s laser-cut Bus Pirate cases to give away, we’ll send it to anyone who makes a contribution to the programmer effort (more below).
The latest source, executable, and scripts are in the SVN.
We put a laser-cut Bus Pirate case as a bounty on this project. Now that we’re over the major hurdle of reading the chip we still want to give it away. The plan is to give it to anyone who gets involved in the programmer effort. That’s pretty loosely defined, and in the case of multiple contributions we’ll put it up to a vote in the forum.