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My Microchip PICKit2 microcontroller programmer arrived yesterday, much to my glee. Actually, it arrived in Oakland via FedEx on Monday, but for some reason Microchip requested that the recipient (me) sign for the $50 package. As if I'd actually be at home at 1:30P on a Monday. So, last night I drove to the Oakland FedEx hub through the slightly scary 98th Avenue neighborhood. Shipping hubs are not always in the best neighborhoods, in my experience. Well, except for the Monterey hub located in the sunny and welcoming Ryan Ranch business park. Ahh...

So, I connected the programmer and demonstration board to the USB port on the Mac Mini and attempted to power the device and see some magic happen. Nothing. The ‘pik2’ program reported that the device could not be found or something. After consulting the documentation I learned that this is commonly associated with the older firmware (mine was 1.0.1). Oh, and you need a PC to upgrade the firmware.

This morning I used my corporate Dell laptop to upgrade the firmware and, yes, lights did flash. Magic happened. I can't wait to experiment with the demo board this weekend. There are a lot of fun microcontroller projects on the Make blog that I'd like to try out. A good beginner project would be the oh-so-80's chasing LEDs made famous by the television show "Night Rider". Maybe Natalie and I can do a little collabo where she designs a garment using her new sewing machine and I deck it out with LEDs. For Phig.