So I picked up a Microstick II from Microchip so I could start getting in to the dsPIC33 along with the PIC24 and more of the PIC32 line of chips.

What a pain! Microchip does NOT make this shit easy! NOTE: There are a lot of line feeds in this post because most of them are important to get this thing working.

After a bunch of back and forth with different versions of MPLAB and MPLAB X I was FINALLY able to get the damn thing to connect and program the PIC32MX250F128B that comes installed on the board:

I ended up installing MPLAB 8 on a VirtualBox instance… and even then, that was only able to detect the Microstick II if I plugged it in to a specific USB port on my 13” Macbook Pro (running 10.8.5) AFTER MPLAB 8 had already started.

I had to go into the programmer settings and check the “Auto Download Latest Firmware” before it would work too.

And even then, I had to re-plug the Microstick II a few times just to get the new firmware on to the device. It’d download… then hang. I’d unplug it, I’d plug it back in, it’d download something different… then hang.

But, once it was finally updated, it was able to detect the device (I had to set the device correctly in “Configure -> Select Device…” first) and ended up programming the blinking led demo code correctly.

SO! Then! To get the thing to work in MPLAB X, so I could start getting on with it under a real environment, I had to do yet ANOTHER trick!

In MPLAB X (freshly updated to v1.9 at this point) I had to go into the Microstick II’s settings (Right click the project in the Projects pane > click Project Properties> click Starter Kit (PKOB) in the Categories pane) I had to UNCHECK “Use Latest Firmware” (select “Firmware” in the drop down).

Somehow, it seems like MPLAB X isn’t able to get the firmware for this thing correctly. And when it tries to, it hangs at “Connecting blahblahblah…”

I also tried the two different ports on the side of the computer and a few different USB cables in all of this.

BLEH! At least this thing is a friggin 32bit device. I keep wondering if it’s worth my time to head over to the AVR camp… but they don’t seem to have any decent toolchains either…