Configuration Settings for MPLAB 5.7

Mark Stevenson · Joined: 03 Jun 2014 Posts: 5

Hello.
Sorry for my first post to be a question. And for such an old product too.

I'm trying to update a program that has been written some time ago (by someone else who no longer works here) for a PIC 16C57C.

I've managed to make the changes I wanted to the program, and I've used PIC-C to compile it successfully. I'm now trying to program it using a PicStart Plus programmer and MPLAB 5.7 (I've downloaded newer versions of MPLAB but they don't seem to support the 16C57).

Following the FAQ on importing a HEX file into MPLAB I get to the 'Configuration' part of the instructions which tells me to:

PCM programmer · Joined: 06 Sep 2003 Posts: 21708

Mark Stevenson · Joined: 03 Jun 2014 Posts: 5

PCM programmer · Joined: 06 Sep 2003 Posts: 21708

See the following page for instructions on how to integrate CCS with MPLAB:

How do I get CCS to work inside MPLAB® IDE?
http://www.ccsinfo.com/faq.php?page=ccs_mplab

Mark Stevenson · Joined: 03 Jun 2014 Posts: 5

RF_Developer · Joined: 07 Feb 2011 Posts: 839

Its easy to integrate current and recent versions of CCS C into recent versions of MPLAB, but I am not so sure about "legacy" version of CCS C into new MPLABs. There is now a utility supplied by CCS that sorts out the integration, but I don't know when that came into use, and which CCS versions are compatible with which MPLAB versions.

Mark, you 3.112 is an old CCS version. CCS is now on 5.02something. There may be problems with getting the two to work.

I don't like compiling CCS code in MPLAB. Others like to, but I'm not keen. I prefer the CCS IDE. However the company I work for historically used MPLAB as a production programming tool, partnered with ICD 2 and later ICD 3 programming hardware. So I had to use the hex file import facility in MPLAB. I've never had any problem with it, but I'm using more recent CCS (4.109 onwards) and MPLABs (all version 8.something). There is only one problem, and that's that MPLAB doesn't recognise the PIC type that's coded into CCS hex files, so I have to set the device type manually.

I strongly suspect early MPLABs required more effort, or different means, to get the configuration bytes, the "fuses", set up correctly. For a long time however, this has been done in the hex file and no operator intervention is required. I understand that with CCS C the config "fuses" have always been set in the source code, but it may well be that older MPLABs didn't/couldn't use this data. What I am saying here is that with code and tools that old, there may be gotchas in the tools/IDEs that you need to be aware of.

We've gone over to CCS Load-N-Go programmers in the last year of so. These have proved much more suited to production use - far simpler and more controllable from a quality point of view. And the ops staff like using them. They are easy, don't need a PC or long wires, and can even be sent out to our service centres when field upgrades are required. With these we have the opposite problem: to get Microchip compiler compiled code to work, we have to patch the device type into the hex file.