. Today, I entered into my University's Virtual Classroom and I saw something new, a project. This one ask us to make an ICSP PIC programmer with Arduino, and the background of It is really interesting.

Usually, PICs, an integrated circuit manufactured by the Microchip Company, have their own programmers, which we know as PICkits. These have been used as the standard for many decades, and for good reasons. They are all you ask in most occasions: You can program a Microcontroller easily by removing It and inserting It into a socket.

The problem comes when we have circuits where we don't want to remove the PIC, either because we'll have to desolder a lot of components or because we don't want to damage it by taking It off and reinserting It into a new board.

This, coupled with the fact that PICKITs are quite expensive, with the PICKit 4 going over the 100$ sum on Amazon. This, for students, is a high price to pay. But there's an alternative.

Since we use Arduino, a Development Board powered by an Atmega328p microcontroller, we can use this as a programmer, and the best of all: We don't have to remove the PIC from our circuit.

Then, our task is to create a programmer using Arduino for PICS. However, there are a lot of challenges, like creating voltages of 12-13V from Arduino's 5V outputs to power the PIC's programming mode and understanding Hex files opcodes. A challenging, yet thrilling project.

That being said, this is going to be a fun week.

Thank you for your support and good luck!

P.S: Tomorrow's post was supposed to be My 5 Minutes a day #18, so I did put #19 in this one.