Well, I'm making progress on my PIC programmer. This has been one of those projects that has been overly difficult and problematic for no apparent reasons. I had problems with some of the switches with built-in LED’s I’ve been using; a couple of them were faulty and that caused me some head scratching for a while. Then my current PIC programmer would work with my PC at all; for some reason the USB card in the PC had come lose but again, I spent a fair amount of time re-booting the PC and messing around. Needless to say all the other USB devices that are plugged into the other USB ports were working fine. I then had problems getting the PIC (there’s a PIC at the core of my new programmer) to work correctly. For some reason the results were very intermittent and I was getting worried that the design was fundamentally flawed, but it turned out that there’s an “issue” with the AMICUS compiler which I need to report to the manufacturer. This really should have been a weekend type project instead it’s been dragging on for several weeks. However, I managed to get one of it’s channels up and working yesterday and it worked perfectly, so now I just need to etch a couple of additional boards for the  remaining programming channels, and then create some interconnect cables and it’s done.