Somewhere in a far Ukrainian village land, where Chupacabra is known to be lurking around, two guys, a software and a hardware one, gathered to program their first PIC18f452 micro-controller. The hardware guy have soldered together a simple serial port programmer (also known as JDM programmer), then the software guy have wrote a simple C programme and built a hex file for pic18f452 from it. Then they spent 4 sleepless nights trying to put that m%%..fu@$#%ing hex into that bloody PIC using piklab-prog utility that installs as a part of piklab IDE for Ubuntu... as a result they discovered that piklab-prog is good at reading the PIC, but pretty bad at programming it, so they tried "picprog", another Linux CLI utility for writing hex files into PIC micro-controllers, and voila... the test program works like a charm - PIC working at 24MHz (using external clock) blinks two LEDs one after another as planned. next stop - audio hardware. stay tuned for updates. cheers

P.S. 10'' Chinese TV set DongSheng has been used as a display. We also made a good progress creating PCBs using photoengraving method on a board covered with a photoresist film.