Working with PIC Programmer K150

This is an account of my attempts to make a K150 PIC Programmer purchased from ebay work. There are way too many PICs and PIC Programmers out there and it can be overwhelming for anyone starting with microcontroller programming!

Here's how my programmer looks - with a 40 pin ZIF socket and support for most of the 12x, 16x, 18x PICs that I could ever plan to use in the recent future, this seemed like a good purchase.

This programmer uses a USB to COM Port virtual bridge to communicate with the PC. The drivers are available when you first plug in the USB from your PC to the programmer.

Once installed, we need to set the COM Port to be used as shown below

Double click on the Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port

Select one of the single digit ports available - yes, the programmer only works with Single Digit port no

Now start MicroBrn.exe and select the programmer as K150 - also select the chip you want to program in the chip selector. You need to set the desired port in the programmer appropriately from File>Port menu. Note it is Port COM2 in my case since that's what we set up earlier using Device Mgr.

Ensure that the pin alignment is correct e.g., in case of 16F84A, it's 2nd pin of the ZIF socket that aligns with 1st pin of the PIC

Once ready, click on "Read" button to see if you are able to read the chip contents from the PIC programmer. If that works, next thing you want to do is "Load" an existing Hex file from your file system and click on "Program" button - if everything has been set up fine, this will burn the PIC with your program contents.

Happy PIC-ing :)