The evaluation board for the PIC18F8520 is part number DM183020. The demo board comes with a different part, but its supposed to work with the 18F8520. Its out of stock at digi-key, but normally $49.00. The chip itself is $11.28. Its a companion to the MPLAB ICD-2 so I'm not sure whether you can program it without that.

The microchip page refers to a serial bootloader. I would assume that this is how you program it in the demo board (and probably how we do it in the control system also).

The demo board does not include the 13V power supply needed to program the chip. The pins used by the ICD modular jack are well documented, so you can probably modify the board to work without the debugger.

the only thing that makes me apprehensive about using these tools are that FIRST has said (or maybe it was innovationfirst) that microchip is providing a modified version of the C18 libraries to work with the IFI controllers...so i'm not sure these compilers would have the right libs/directives needed to properly compile a program for the new controllers.

i'm not saying these tools WON'T work, im just saying it's a possibility...i'd hate to get familiarized with an IDE/compiler and then not be able to use it :(

Then just copy the libraries over and link to them. No one said you had to use the libraries included with the compiler (sdcc).

Not to say there won't be any work getting files distributed by IFI to work with SDCC/MPASM/etc. We'll see.

Does anyone know when this information will be available? I assume we can start this all with the edu-kits once we get them right?

Or do we have to wait until the actual kickoff?

i don't see why you couldn't start with the edu-kits...they have the same chip, but different default code from what i understand.

Now just to get the insane amount of money we need to apply and get our EDUkit...

Hmmm, sounds like we'll be applying right around Dec. 14th again this year. :-\

Just got the cd and tried installing the ide through wine. It didn't work. It wanted IE (just to install), which seems a little overkill..

Anybody got a link for IE?

IFI loader installed successfully through wine (20031016), though I'm not sure if it'll work. I think it should, but I don't have the serial ports configured nor have a edu-rc to play with ATM.

I think I'll be aiming for a IFI Loader+GPASM+SDCC combo for now. I'm really not sure if it's possible to replace the IFI Loader yet. I also need to consider all the binaries that will run on the controller that they give us, and see which ones can be tossed and which ones are less trivial to replace.

Hopefully, I won't fry the edu-rc in the process.

Update: MPLAB needs IE 5.0 and up to run, actually.. The install prog just makes sure it's there before trying.

Update: Oh, and the compiler itself installs fine, without any complaints whatsoever from wine. You must use the native, not built in version of msvcrt in order to use the compiler, otherwise it fails to spawn helper programs. Wine's msvcrt is deficient in this area for some reason.

I've successfully compiled the edu_rc default code through wine with some tedious manual compiling. Not sure if the generated .hex actually works.

Just ran the IFI loader now, and it seems less than perfectly stable. Wine spits out a good number of warnings about things not actually being implemented and stubs (not too bad, happens with some apps), and attempting to open a terminal window takes the whole thing down (bad).

Hopefully, it'll be just the terminal window that kills the thing, since terminals aren't too uncommon.

Update: Crashes on loading .hex files too. Spits out a 440 automation error (whatever that means) and exits.

darn.

Any idea on WineX? I'll try a few other builds of Wine when I get the software.

depends on the version that you will be using. You might be able to modify some versions of WineX but it just depends on the version that you will be using. Crossover has a fairly good list of compatible programs but they are mainly geared to MS Office based programs and some other programs such as Internet browsers and other mainstream windows programs. I haven't tried it yet on Crossover or Transgaming (hey it could work) but i'll post what results I get when I get the time.

I would definetly like to not have to use windows this year if possible, and I am sure there are plenty of other too. Lets keep this discussion open as we find out more :)

With out using WINE, here are some links to utilities for PIC C development with in linux. http://www.ccsinfo.com/newtopiclinux.html or just a simple google search will show you more tools for developing PIC C in a linux environment.

I think the biggest problem right now is getting something to replace the IFI loader.

The IFI loader program looks like a vb program that acts as a frontend for PICBOOT.dll. Being a frontend makes me think that IFI probably didn't do much work with making their own bootloader(or whatever it's called). If the way they upload the hex files isn't unique, it shouldn't be as hard to find something that does what we need. Of course, I'm just guessing it's a frontend since it looks like it uses vb. Anyone smart enough to write a program to program the PIC wouldn't use VB... hopefully.

http://www.ccsinfo.com/newtopiclinux.html doesn't seem to add much more new info than what was already found in this thread.

I doubt transgaming will work. Transgaming is also mildly evil. Crossover has a slim chance I guess, but you never know. I don't think it's a solution though, due to the fact that we have to buy it. ;)

Getting the libraries in the cd to work with sdcc and gputils seems possible, though I can't say I've generated a hex file yet. That'll be the next thing I do, unless we figure out this PICBOOT.dll thing..