Programming Microchip starter kits from MPIDE

Running on Microchip Starter Kits

MPIDE has been expanded explicitly to support all of the Microchip starter kits such as:

• PIC32 Starter Kit
• PIC32 USB Starter Kit
• PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit
• Explorer 16 Starter Kit

Currently for all of these boards you will need some sort of USB to serial adapter. For all but the Exp-16 I use an FTDI cable that breaks out to pins. I connect those to pins on the expansion board for uart1. The PIC32 USB Starter Kit and PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kits are also compatible with the USB PIC32 bootloader. The Explorer-16 has an on-board DB-9 RS-232 connector. This is connected to UART2. The bootloader is configured to use UART2 for the Explorer-16 and the Serial ports for Arduino are remapped so that Serial.print goes to uart2 and Serial1.print goes to uart1. This is all done automatically so the user does not have to worry about it at all. In order to install the bootloader on any of these boards, you have to have one of the Microchip compatible programmers such as the MPLAB ICD 3 or PICkit 3. Ideally you should download MPLAB X IDE from microchip (http://www.microchip.com/mplabx) and use that to compile and burn the bootloader. The bootloader source and pre-compiled hex files are all on github. (https://github.com/chipKIT32/pic32-Arduino-Bootloader)

Using other PIC32 boards

As far as using MPIDE with other boards, the answer is YES, it should work with ANY PIC32 there is. The only limit might be it won't work on chips smaller than 32K, And that's because it hasn't been tried on anything smaller. To get it to work on other boards, a few things have be be done.

• First, the bootloader has to be burned onto the target board. The source is on github and MPLAB is used to compile and burn the bootloader. The multi-platform MPLAB-X was used on a Mac, but other versions should work as well.
• If you using a chip that has not already been added to avrdude.conf, that has to be done.
• You need to add a new entry to boards.txt and then you will be able to program the board directly from MPIDE.