Microchip’s PICKit 2 Starter Kit

The pk2cmd tool is provided here as a way to avoid problems resulting from the changing state of Microchip’s original PICKit 2 Starter Kit website.

We have the following available files for the user:

• Windows Commandline Source v1.20
• Windows Desktop App Source v2.61
• Linux and Mac OSX Source v1.20
• Firmware Update v2.32

Installation Notes for Linux and Mac OS X

If you have pk2cmd installed in /usr/local you will need to set the PATH variable as follows before doing the write to the microcontroller:

$ export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/bin:/usr/share/pk2

You may also want to add the following to your udev rules directory as the file 99_pickit2.rules:

$ cat > /etc/udev/rules.d/99_pickit2.rules 
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", ATTR{idVendor}=="04d8",
ATTR{idProduct}=="0033", MODE="0664", GROUP="plugdev" SYMLINK+="pickit2"

This will create a /dev/pickit2 symlink to your programmer as well. It is a good way to test if your programmer was loaded correctly or not.

Before you run pk2cmd on Mac OS X, you will need to set the lsusb command which is available on Linux but not on the Mac but is used by pk2cmd internally.

$ alias lsusb="system_profiler SPUSBDataType"

You may need to set these in the ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile of your shell to avoid having to run these steps every time.