Weblog - Jan Wagemakers -

According to this (unofficial) news message my current provider (Easynet) stops with providing its services to non-business customers.

This means that the URL of my webpage (and also this weblog) will change soon. Also my E-mail address will change.

I can understand the decission of Easynet Belgium to focus only on "Business and corporate" customers. But doing this without any official communication is IMHO just bad practice!

_{Keywords for google: Jan Wagemakers, website, new location, change, new URL, move, moved}

At this link you can read how I have build the serial port power booster and tested it with picprog on an old laptop. It works at 600Mhz but not at 750Mhz.

Maarten Blomme has hacked a little-bit on the delay-routines in picprog. With this hack I can also use the serial port power booster on the laptop at 750Mhz.

You can find Maarten's hack here.

A JDM-style programmer is a nice and simple hardware design to program a PIC microcontroller.

However, it doesn't work with all serial ports because the voltage of those ports is too low. I have heard that a lot of serial ports found on laptops have this problem.

At http://www.qsl.net/eb4eqa/serial_booster/serial_booster.htm you can find a nice little schematic where a +5V-powered MAX205 is used to power up the voltage of a serial port.

I have build this schematic and tested it with an old laptop, my home-build pic-programmer and picprog. It does work, but only when I run at 600Mhz. At 750Mhz I get verify-errors, maybe because I have not shielded the device enough and because the cable of my pic-programmer is a little-bit long.

I have taken the +5V from the PS/2-keyboard.

Here is a picture of it:

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