| Projects: PIC Programmer |
Fine, so I didn't design this circuit. I blindly followed a schematic... and what do you know, it eventually worked.
I had two problems with the construction of this circuit. First, I ended up killing the one transistor on the board by holding the iron to it for too long... it took a while to diagnose as all the solder joints were in the correct place. The second time around, I used pliers as a heatsink, and did the soldering as quickly as possible. The whole thing worked flawlessly.
With one problem. At the time, I did not have a ZIF socket on the programmer. I had to be very careful while inserting and removing PICs from the socket. More than once, I nearly bent pins off the chip. Unfortunately, ZIFs don't fit inside regularly spaced component boards, and they cannot be forced into a regular socket. I created an adaptor consisting of a component carrier and the ZIF socket itself: I soldered the ZIF to the component carrier, and stuck the new device into the socket.
And the PIC Programmer was done.
For more information on the PIC 16F84, see my PIC page.
PIC 16F84 Programmer with RS-232 interface cable
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