Velleman K8048 - VM111 PIC programmer

25 Jul 2007 A couple days ago, I bought a PIC programmer from Velleman. It requires a 12V or 15V power supply which was not in the package when I bought it. Luckily, we have a big box of 12V power adaptors at work (each FOT comes with one and we don't use them, so we have A LOT of them. Maybe I should take a picture...)

Now I have a 12V adaptor and it works nicely with the K8048. The software that came with it is Windows only, so I had to reboot (after making an image of the CD under linux... you never know)

[rant]
Whenever I boot Windows, every tiny program I run starts bugging me about needing to be upgraded. What a fine concept! Programs that can detect if they are out of date all by themselves. That's really great! Now if only they could just go ahead and update themselves without redirecting me to a website where I would have to manually download a new .exe or zip-file and run it, now THAT would be even better.

Best of all though would be that MS Windows came with a decent package manager bt default like most (if not all) Linux distributions do since the last half decade.
[/rant]

Anyway, the program to program the PIC works fine. There is also an assembler on the CD to compile a second demo program. It runs fine as well, as long as you don't put the assembler code anywhere you like. You see, it can't work with pathnames longer than 62 characters in length. What a load of crap...

Luckily, there are plenty of better compilers under Linux. The program remains the programmer though... There is an opensource tool for that, but it's not in apt :(

Perhaps I can run the thing from virtualbox or vmware, and trap whatever goes over the serial line...

[Update 20070726]
This is what the K8048 looks like:
[G2:11569]

This picture was taken without a flash (because the flash adds a bright white spot on the PCB) and is blurry for some reason. Maybe I should learn how to make pictures the right way (better lighting ?)