The first AN598 based programmer…	…bottom
My second programmer…	…bottom
My third and last "home made" programmer…	…still the bottom.

… and, well, finally it ended with this one!

PIC?

Here are the programmers I made when I started with PICs; the first and third are based on MICROCHIP's AN589 and the second is a medley of different serial programmer schemas found in the web.

As the first one is a common programmer, number 2 and 3 have the ability to disconnect physically the DATA, CLOCK and MCLR without the need of removing the wires from the target chip.

Programmer 2 can do this via a 2 poles inverter switch and programmer 3 does it fully automatically with the use of relays and the WINPIC programming software from DL4YHF (more info to be found here: http://freenet-homepage.de/dl4yhf/winpicpr.html) which supports this feature (Connect).

Nowadays, parallel and serial ports tend to disappear from PCs, so I decided to go for MICROCHIP's PICKIT2 programmer; it is great tool, works always and the software is just a dream for hobbyists like me.