another 2am

2am woke, as in woke up, as distinct from the current trend of woke. Feeling down. Is that something wrong with me. Obtensibly life is good. Great group of friends, beautiful girlfriend, work going well. Cat and dog. Etc etc.  OK onto more positive and productive stuff. Blog then meditation I guess. Maybe a distraction via wordle. 

Yesterday afternoon, 

I called Ro and headed over for dinner. My contribution is a pack of four and twenty pies from Coles.

Arrived and Tim was in the pool. I had a pair of shorts in the car so grabbed them and jumped in the pool for a very refreshing swim. After the rain of Christmas, it's suddenly gotten hot.

Tim has a deadish lap top that is off at the shop. The difficulty is it will not charge the battery. A key thing with this laptop is it has a parallel port and connects to a programmer that he uses to program pic microprocessors.

His pic of choice is PIC 18F4550

I had a look on Google and there are lots of boards advertised on ebay and Ali express for about $20 that feature a zero insertion force socket and a USB B socket. 

BUT can they program 18F4550 and what software do they use?

PIC PROGRAMMING RESEARCH

These guys seem to be useful

https://www.minikits.com.au/pic-adap-01?search=Pic%20progtammer

Pickit gets a mention. - turns out the PIC manufacturer, MICROCHIP, calls the official programmer Pickit. The current model is pickit5 and has a USBC interface. $154+GST from mouser. The software is MPLAB.