Hardware iterations:

Once you get your prototype hardware kinda' running, you suddenly find yourself with the issue of carrying on development without breaking what you already have. For software this is relatively easy, use CVS, git or whatever your preferred method of source code control is. For hardware, you pretty much need to have a second unit available so that you can continue to use rev-1 while still developing on rev-1A. This is all fine and dandy when you've cast your design in stone and had PCBs produced, but becomes a little more time consuming when everything is still on stripboard. So, I cheated again...

A while back, [Seb] of the JALLIB group, very kindly sent me a JALuino Bee v2 board for evaluation (it's a great little board and a wonderful advertisement for JALv2 and JALLIB) which I'd played with, but hadn't really put to any good use yet. The part of this project which I was stumbling over at the time was the XPort implementation (and trying to get a simple, "curses" like library working), so I pressed the "Bee" board into use as a development system, cobbled together with yet another stripboard with the actual XPort and voltage regulator on-board.

It may look a little Heath Robinson, but it works fine and saved me a ton of time over building another complete PIC18 main board. Thanks again Sebastien, the "Bee v2" rocks!