Hi! You may have read in the last day or two some news in the PIC and AVR camps. Microchip and Atmel, for you fanboys out there. Pretty Exciting stuff. As You may know, Microchip actually tried to buy Atmel like 3, 4 years ago or something now.

But It all fell through and negotiations didn't work out,. the financial crisis happened, somewhere or another partner pulled out, blah blah blah. But The two companies have been talking ever since then,, and they've finally announced what is a cross-platform technology sharing agreement between the two companies, where the tools from both companies are going to support the other company's products! What The?! But As it turns out,, it's not as silly as it sounds, because they're now sharing fabs,. the two companies are co-operating on various levels, so it makes sense, I guess, for the two companies to offer support for the individual products.

So What? Atmel, first cab off the rank, they're going to have a new AVR Dragon, almost identical to the current AVR Dragon, but it's going to support the Microchip parts. And vice-versa There will be very shortly,, if not already,, a new PICkit 4, which will also have device support for Atmel parts. Now Atmel have-- they don't have the new production hardware ready right now,, but they sent me some firmware upgrades for my existing AVR Dragon board, as you may be familiar with, that allows it to program Microchip PICa-- Pa-- parts and be compatible with the MP-- the new MPLAB X environment! So Woohoo! Give It a Go!! Now This is actually rather clever and possible because of-- not too dissimilar programming interfaces between the two. If You know the PICkit 3 and the ICSP interface, 6 pin single inline header of course,, but the AVR ISP interface is a 6-pin dual inline header.

But Nothing you can't fix with a adapter cable of course. But There are, of course,, you know,, protocol and other differences between the two.. And Of course, a lot of the PICs require that high Voltage programming source, that VPP source, which of course, the AVR Dragon you can do the high voltage programming part on there. But I Believe that the-- you have to wait for the new version of the AVR Dragon to get that capability, they will have the Microchip ICSP port directly on the board so you can just, you know,, in a pin-- you don't need the adapter cable, just plugs directly in.

But I Don't have the new hardware, I've only got the new firmware for the existing one, which you're able to download. for owners of the old AVR Dragon. So This old version of the board with the new official firmware will only support PICs with the low Voltage programming-- LVP Programming mode. So We're going to actually try that today.

I've got the new firmware programmed in. We're going to bring in an old friend, the Micro Calc project. You May remember this from quite a few years ago, I did a video on this, never finished the thing unfortunately.. World's first credit-card thin scientific calculator.

Really Awesome little project. Those Bodge wires, if you remember, that was a silicon bug. Did a video on this silicon bug inside the PIC24 series chip. Real Pain in the ass that one was.

So It swapped the ICSP interface. We'll-- Anyway,, this 24F PIC supports LVP mode, so we should be able to program it with this new firmware. Let's give it a try. And As far as I know,, Microchip are not going to release firmware for the existing PICkit 3 to support the AVR devices.

But you will be able to buy the new PICkit 4, which will support, I believe-- What they're telling me is the full range of AVR chips. Awesome. Because Really,, it's just a-- apart from the high voltage programming stuff,, it's really just a protocol difference between the two, because you're just driving logic I/O pins basically. So, you know, that's how they're able to do this.

It's actually rather cool. So It's got to get power from the actual board itself, and it does that by--. there's a second VCC connector up here. If you're familiar with the AVR Dragon, you can supply power through to the board, no worries..

So I've just got it hooked up to the ISP, I've got the new official firmware in there. Let's see if we can get this thing talking. I Mean we're plugging it-- plug it in and it doesn't auto-detect. What I've got here is the PICkit 3 programmer software, but it will work inside MPLAB X or whatever software you want to use.

So It doesn't auto-detect. Let's go into Tools and it should check communication-- it should identify it as a genuine PICkit 3. It shouldn't know the difference. Tada! Hey, PICkit 3 connected, ID, no worries! Alright Now let's give this thing a go, shall we? We've got it connected.

No Device detected there yet, because we haven't chosen our device family. But Once we choose our device family-- 24F, hopefully it should auto-read, and let's give it a go. Yep! And... Bingo! Look at that.

PIC-- woohoo! We Have a winner! PIC24 Device found. There it is! 24FJ256GA106 Alright We've got all FFs at the moment in that chip. So If we read it, let's give it a go. I Can't remember what's actually programmed into this thing.

You know, I-- as far as I know, it doesn't work, there's nothing on the LCD, I was in, you know,, debug mode or whatever, I was mucking around it with last-- many years ago. I don't know. But It should read in something, we should be able to read in some data. So Let's give it a go, shall we? Read.

There We go, hey. Our Light's come on, it's reading, it's reading... Come on. It's taking its fat time about it.

Oop, done. Look at that! Beautiful. And Now we have-- what do we have? Yep, we've got data. It's no longer FF, it's all 1670, whatever that is,.

Config done. But There is. Yeah, there is data there. So I Don't know what program I had in this thing, but it doesn't matter.

So There you go, it reads-- there you go! We Have a-- we have an AVR Dragon now supports PIC chips! Awesome. And We'll try that same thing again,. let's just write the same data back because I don't have the original program. Who cares,.

let's just see if it writes. It reads No problem at all. Program Memory, also the configuration, fuses,, everything. So We'll just write that.

Writing device, program memory... yeah,, could take awhile. Come back when it's done. Well This thing's got like 256K of flash, it's got a lot of flash in there so it will take a bit.

Woohoo! There We go. Programming successful. Bingo! That works a treat! I Declare that to be a winner. It's not running of course,.

nothing actually runs on this-- firmware-- I powered it up before and-- before this, and it doesn't run at all. So. We have a winner! I like it. So There you have it, that worked.

An absolute treat. We Now have the AVR Dragon programming-- well,, in this case a PIC24F part. No problems at all. Reading And programming, that's just awesome.

And Apparently they're going to now support-- Atmel are going to support all of the Microchip parts and Microchip are going to support all of the Atmel parts officially in their various development environments and on their programming platforms like the AVR Dragon and the PICkit 3. So Watch out for the new AVR Dragon version of this, which has the ICSP support on it, and the new PICkit 4, which is coming out shortly. I have been promised one. I Don't know, it could be in the mail, but I'm definitely going to do some more videos on this when it arrives, because this is a big historic announcement.

I Like it! It means that you can choose either of the company's development tools to support each other. And It makes sense. Companies Like this. Have to team up like this these days, in order to survive.

So It-- I, you know,, it's probably going to piss off a lot of the fan boys, they're not going to be happy. "Aww, the Atmel fan boys I can-- I don't want my development tools polluted with that Microchip crap, ", they're ranting in their mother's basement. Goodness. Anyway, I like it.

I Give it a thumb's up, it works. I haven't-- don't know what happens with the compiler support at the moment, I haven't tried that. But All the details are on the Atmel and Microchip websites, and I'll link those in down below and you can check out the announcements and stuff for yourself.. So More videos coming soon.

If You want to discuss it, jump on over to the EEVblog Forum! And If you like the video, please give it a big thumbs up as always. Catch you next time. captioned by Sen.