Hey all.

I Have a Minipro TL866II+ and would like to program a PIC16F84 with 
using linux. The only software I found that seems to work with this 
combination is https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro . I've checked 
that the hardware and software is working together, by writing binary 
data to a 24C32:

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$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=foo.bin count=8 bs=512 && ./minipro -p 24C32 -w foo.bin && ./minipro -p 24C32 -r bar.bin && diff bar.bin foo.bin && echo $?

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8+0 records in

3

8+0 records out

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4096 bytes (4.1 kB, 4.0 KiB) copied, 0.000526638 s, 7.8 MB/s

5

Found TL866II+ 04.2.103 (0x267)

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Warning: Firmware is newer than expected.

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  Expected  04.2.99 (0x263)

8

  Found     04.2.103 (0x267)

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Erasing... 0.05Sec OK

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Writing Code...  1.99Sec  OK

11

Reading Code...  0.61Sec  OK

12

Verification OK

13

Found TL866II+ 04.2.103 (0x267)

14

Warning: Firmware is newer than expected.

15

  Expected  04.2.99 (0x263)

16

  Found     04.2.103 (0x267)

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Reading Code...  0.61Sec  OK

18

0

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Then I tried to read from a chip already programmed (and verified 
working) with MPLABX;

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minipro -p PIC16F84 -r out.bin

But: code was all zeros, config was all zeros and when specifying 
retrieve data it just fails on "async data transfer."

Browsing for clues, I found one place hinting that this chip needs to be 
programmed with ICSP. There's an ICSP connector on the programmer, but 
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. With MPLABX I've used a 
PicKit3, and I tried to connect the board the PicKit ICSP plugs into and 
run with the ICSP option, but it doesn't make a difference.

1

minipro -p PIC16F84 -i -r out.bin

When writing to the PIC16F84, the progress indicator tells it's writing, 
but ultimately fails saying "Verification failed at address 0x0000: 
File=0x83, Device=0x00"


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Any hints would be welcome, either on how to make this setup work, or 
alternative setups that could work that are not the proprietary PIC 
stuff.

Thanks.