[Flashforth-devel] Microchip Dev-Tool Deal boards

[craig b. <dab...@ya...>]

To anyone out there concerned (or amused),

	At the risk of sounding like a Microchip Shill, I've been collecting toys from their monthly Dev-Tool-Deals.  Their Curiosity Nano Evaluation Kits retail at $15 and the MPLAB(R) Xpress Evaluation Boards go for $12, but the loss-leader deals knock 20-50% off.  It tends to be enough to pay for the shipping or a little more.  The boards have Microchip’s version of the Atmel debugger (from the X-plained series) and are designed to plug into a USB port and go.
	A couple of things to watch out for are your machine set-up and the version of MPLabX that you run.  My work machine is set up for supporting legacy hardware and runs Python v2.7 and Win-7… It won’t talk to the DM320119 - SAMD21 Board because MPLAB runs with Python 3.  I spent a few weeks in daily contact with Microchip Support without either side thinking that this might be a problem.
	I haven’t been able to determine if this is why I can’t get MPLabX to recognize the Xpress boards (I’m sincerely not interested in doing development out in the cloud!).  As a result, I decided just to toss Flash-Forth onto the DM182026 - PIC18F46K42 and was horrified at the list of errors.  Looking into the Project Properties, it would appear that Version 5.40 is even more of a departure for MPLabX than they advertised.  Mpasm is gone so the assembler in XC8 probably needs to be hooked and a whole new can of worm spills out.
	I cheated. I went back to MPLabX 5.35 and everything assembled fine.  I used the board’s USB to power it, jacked my trusty PICkit-3 into the appropriate pins, attached an FTDI-basic to UART1 and everything worked.  I’m hoping to be able to use the onboard USB to talk to Terra-Term for me, but I’m not holding my breath.

	Excluding the PIC16 based and the 32-bit processors, there are 2 Xpress boards of potential interest for running FlashForth:

Part Number: DM182026 - PIC18F46K42 MPLAB(R) Xpress Evaluation Board
Part Number: DM182027 - PIC18F47K40 MPLAB(R) Xpress Evaluation Board

7 Curiosity Nano offerings may work although I really don’t know much about the formerly Atmel lineup:

Part Number: DM164150 - PIC18F57Q43 Curiosity Nano Evaluation Kit
Part Number: DM182029 - PIC18F47Q10 Curiosity Nano Evaluation kit
Part Number: DM182028 - PIC18F47K42 Curiosity Nano Evaluation kit
Part Number: DM164151 - AVR128DA48 Curiosity Nano Evaluation Kit
Part Number: DM320115 - ATmega4809 Curiosity Nano Evaluation kit
Part Number: DM080103 - ATtiny1607 Curiosity Nano Evaluation Kit
Part Number: EV50J96A - ATtiny3217 Curiosity Nano Evaluation Kit

	The AVR128DA48 in particular appears to be fairly new and may have come out since the merger.  I’m trying to catch up to the PIC18F4xK42 before tackling these “Q” things (grin).

Peter?  Mikael?  Anyone?  I’m curious if I’m the only one crazy enough to be banging my head against these (big grin).

craig bair