ESPPIC - ESP-based PIC programmer

Description

I'm currently away from home and forgot to pack my PICKIT3 and now I need to flash a few PIC16F1705's . So what to do? Purchase another PICKIT or just repurpose something that I actually did put in my bag? I choose the latter since I don't want to lug around even more stuff than I'm already doing, and why spend money when I can do a cool hack instead? ;-)

This device will allow me to just hook up the ESP via 5 wires to a PIC and then just open a browser on my laptop, navigate to the ESP webpage over wifi and then drag and drop the hex file to be flashed onto the PIC. Nice and easy.

Project Logs

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WiFi'ized and uploadable hexxes
matseng • 11/21/2016 at 04:18 • 5 comments

Well, I now reached another milestone. I added a web interface to it, so now I can remotely upload and flash the PIC chip via the ESP.
First life
matseng • 11/19/2016 at 08:18 • 0 comments

After a day worth of document reading, hacking and debugging code I can now read/set the fuse bits and also flash and dump the code memory of the PIC. This with the PIC hex code hardcoded into a string array in the esppic software.
Even if I could flash and read back the code successfully my PIC test firmware did't work - the pic looked completely dead. I spend an hour debugging the esp code and focused on the fuse/config settings, but no joy. Then I realised that my pic test code was broken. I didn't use the LAT register for toggling the port for the flashing LED. Doh! I'm really too experienced to spend that long time on a beginners mistake like that. ^__^
So now I basically just have to patch in the webserver code so code can be uploaded over wifi instead of being hardcoded. Ans also make the code support more than just the 16F1705 of course.
I put the codes up at my github - https://github.com/SmallRoomLabs/esppic
Starting
matseng • 11/18/2016 at 15:22 • 0 comments

I think that the RAM in the ESP8266 will be enough to handle up to 16KW devices, for bigger devices I might have to upgrade to the ESP32.... Or maybe I can upload the hex directly to a file onto the SPIFFS file system. Then I can handle hex files bigger than what the largest PIC requires.
But for the time being I'm happy with just hardcoded support for the 8Kword 16F1705 device.
I have hooked up the ESP and the PIC with a LED on a solderless breadboard. Time to start coding - this shouldn't be too hard. The Microchip LVP protocol is rather simple and have decent docs.

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Discussions

cm.heong wrote 05/23/2021 at 09:08

Enjoyed building the project, thank you! I have a little writeup on the experience at https://cmheong.blogspot.com/2021/05/wifi-ota-for-microchip-pics-i-love.html

Are you sure? yes | no

dungliem1992 wrote 05/19/2017 at 02:12

Hello matseng,
I use PIC18LF14K50 to program to PIC16F1619 (at LVP mode), I wanna use your LVP protocol, but I don't know how to modify your code:

Store(USERID+0, SWAP16(0x8031)); delay_ms(5);

Store(USERID+1, SWAP16(0x0228)); delay_ms(5);

Store(USERID+2, SWAP16(0x8731)); delay_ms(5);

Store(USERID+3, SWAP16(0xE12F)); delay_ms(5);

Store(CONFIG1, SWAP16(0xE4C9)); delay_ms(5);

Store(CONFIG2, SWAP16(0xFBFF)); delay_ms(5);

Where can I find these values: 0x8031, 0x0228, 0x8731, 0xE12F, 0xE4C9, 0xFBFF ?
Thank you.

Are you sure? yes | no

deqing wrote 11/21/2016 at 07:35

This is cool.

It seems you are using a ESP dev board so I suppose it work as low voltage programming?

Are you sure? yes | no

matseng wrote 11/21/2016 at 07:45

Yes. Currently I'm using a NodeMCU board since I had one with me in the bag, but really any esp8266 with 3 available gpio should work.

And yes. This project is only targeting the modern PICs that supports the LVP Low Voltage Programming method. I really don't care about ancient devices that costs as much as the modern but are less capable. ;-)

Are you sure? yes | no

deqing wrote 11/21/2016 at 07:47

You are right. I only use high voltage when I'm forced to use reset pin as IO.

Are you sure? yes | no

matseng wrote 11/21/2016 at 08:49

Mmm... That extra pin can be the reason for not getting a larger and more expensive package/device. So it's good to have that option when required. That's why I also have a pickit and a icd as well - but didn't bring either of them on the trip.

Are you sure? yes | no

Jarrett wrote 11/18/2016 at 17:03

Might be worth checking out:

https://hackaday.io/project/8559-microchip-pic-arduino-based-programmer

and

http://hackaday.com/2012/05/02/arduino-can-program-pic-too/

It's possible they can programmed directly onto the ESP with the Arduino IDE, with minimal changes :)

Following this one, because I was totally going to do something similar in a few weeks. I have a board coming with the UART pins between PIC and ESP coming though, so I was going to write a bootloader.

Are you sure? yes | no

matseng wrote 11/18/2016 at 17:44

ah... I knew I should have searched more before starting this project. :-) But it's always nice to do some coding and create something new.

The project by Jaromir is as you said very similar to mine and could probably rather easily be adapted even if it is using a client/server model with software on both the PC and the arduino.

The second project is using the high voltage mode, so it might have a completely different protocol - not really sure since I haven't looked into that mode at all. I'm happy with only support for modern PICs.

But Jamoirs project will be good to glean at for pointers if I get stuck....

Are you sure? yes | no

ESPPIC - ESP-based PIC programmer

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