send an email to
info@vexlabs.com with your address and a daytime telephone number and tell them you wish to buy a prototype programmer. i did this last week on monday morning, received a call a couple of hours later, gave them my credit card info and had the board in my hot little hands friday afternoon. what you will receive is a small board with an rs232 level converter and an 8 pin pic microcontroller, an rj-11 connector at one end and a db9 connector at the other. they include an rs-232 cable, a 6 conductor phone cord and the c-bot disk, (mplab, mcc18 and ifloader), that is apparently used in first programming. what you don't get is a pretty plastic cover for the programmer and the visual programming environment.
alas, i'm still trying to locate a driver for my usb to serial converter.
oh, yeah, $99.00 plus about $8.00 for the ups guy.