Hans Steiner and Patrick Dwyer forwarded a couple of links that should make it possible to program PIC microcontrollers on the Mac. You need to do it in C, and you need to use the Mac Developer Tools, and you need to find or build a programmer that can interface to the tools provided. But here’s a few links (haven’t tried this myself yet):
GNU PIC utilities – GPUTILS is a collection of tools for the Microchip (TM) PIC microcontrollers.
SciSpot lists a link to MacrocASM, an assembler/programmer for the PIC that’s native to OSX, and a few links to hardware programmers.
The combination of these should mean you can program the PIC in C on a Mac. However, there are still some things missing, for those used to higher level programming like BASIC and CCS C. The nice function libraries, like ADC and serial, that come with CCS C and PicBasic Pro, are not here. You will definitely need to know more about the lower level details of the PIC. But hey, it’s a step out of PC world for Mac PIC people.
A bit more from Brygg Ullmer at LSU:
“Regarding Mac programming of PICs: we have had success with this at LSU, to at least some extent. The “picp” program compiled cleanly and worked fine for us from Mac Mini’s (OSX at the time), downloading to PICSTART-compatible programmers (both real and clone, following leads from this list) with a USB->Serial dongle. (Some dongles worked, and others not; but I suspect you guys have a handle on this).
“This was only a half-solution, as we were compiling on the Linux-based CCS compiler on a different machine, scp’ing it over, then picp’ing it on the Mac Mini to a PIC. We’ve just successfully Fedorified a number of Mac Minis (we needed support for some devices which had clean support under Linux, but not under OSX; e.g., using evrouter and gizmod). That *could* open a path toward using CCS on Mac hardware, too — but I slightly doubt they’ve released PPC-compatible binaries yet.”
9-15-05
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