PICkit 2 is a Microchip programmer/debugger designed primarily for Microchip devices.

The fun part is that AVRDUDE can also use a PICkit 2 as an ISP programmer for AVR microcontrollers, including the ATmega328P I was working with here. That AVR support comes from AVRDUDE rather than Microchip’s PICkit 2 application.

Back in 2013, Atmel and Microchip were separate competitors. I originally repeated speculation that Microchip had stopped supporting PICkit 2 because people were using it to program Atmel devices. I have not found evidence for that, so that claim is coming out. Microchip simply moved on to newer programmer/debugger hardware. In a fun historical twist, Microchip later acquired Atmel in 2016.

What I used:

  • PICkit 2
  • the programmer / adapter hardware linked from obddiag.net in the original post
  • PIC12F508, useful for checking that the PICkit 2 setup was functioning
  • ATmega328P as the AVR target
  • AVRDUDE on the Mac

Compiling all of this was particularly entertaining because I had very little idea what I was doing! 😅

This experiment was all part of the Lunchbeat project. I originally intended to come back and document more of the process here, but that never quite happened. The project itself did continue later, including a proper Lunchbeat PICkit 2 PCB and a much longer series of hardware and programming experiments.

Sources