PiKdev V1.2.1 has abdicated.     Its successor is PiKdev V1.4.0.

PiKdev is a simple graphic IDE for the development of PIC-based applications.
It currently supports assembly language. C language is also supported for PIC 18 devices. PiKdev is developed in C++ under Linux.

Why a new version of PiKdev ?

Versions of PiKdev up to V1.2.1 were based on the KDE 3.1.x environment. These versions do not work with recent KDE 4.x based distributions because the old KDE libs are not provided anymore. In fact, it seems that KDE4 and KDE3 libraries cannot work properly together in the same environment. This situation makes PiKdev virtually unusable, even for its author !
For this reason, I decided to port PiKdev to Qt4/KDE4 toolkit. Porting from Qt3 to Qt4 is easy, but porting to KDE3 to KDE4 is not: the API is really different, and the documentation is really insufficient. This is why PiKdev does not use the KDE libraries anymore and is now a "pure Qt" application. For the future, I guess that the porting from Qt4 to Qt5 will be easy because it seems that the compatibility between these libraries is high.
The source code of the new version is simpler than the old one, and easier to maintain. The build/installation process is also dramatically simplified. If you use cpik (my C compiler for PIC18 devices), you must upgrade to cpik V0.7.2 because PiKdev V1.4.0 uses a new way to set the configuration bits of the target device that is not supported by cpik V0.7.1.

Click here to have informations about the latest version.

Key points:
  • A full featured multiview editor, with lines numbering, bookmarks, syntax highlighting and access to various buffers controlled by a combobox,
  • A one-click interface with the gpasm GPL PIC assembler and gplink linker, with automatic jump to faulty instructions in the case of assembly errors,
  • A one-click interface with the gpdasm GPL PIC disassembler.
  • A one-click interface with the cpik pic 18Fxxx C compiler.
  • A project manager with standard functionnalities (create project, open project, open recent project, add file, remove file, configure project, etc),
  • Built-in browser for the HTML documentation provided by gputils V1.0.0
  • Support for all the devices supported by gputils V1.0.0.
  • A programming engine which allow programming various flavors of PIC microcontrollers via classic (ie: D. Tait or JDM compatible) programming hardware connected to the parallel port or to the serial port.

    See my hardware page for a non up-to-date list of such programmers. Unlike some other programming softwares, PiKdev uses the parallel port in user mode, therefore you do not need to execute it with root privileges.

  • Since version V1.0.0, pikdev also supports the PicKit2 USB programmer via the Microchip pk2cmd tool.

The programming engine of PiKdev can be used from a non graphical user interface named pkp. pkp has a simple command line interface and can be used by people who do not use KDE or use an old Linux distribution.

Pikdev supports PICkit 2 programmer from Microchip :

Microchip provides a tool for driving the PICkit 2 USB programmer from command line. This tool is called pk2cmd and its source code is available for both Windows/Mac OS/X and Linux platforms.
This is a very good idea because
-Computers with parallel or serial interface become more and more rare, so JDM or Tait-like programmers are virtually dead :-(
-PICkit 2 is a cheap and and efficient USB programmer with several second sources
-pk2cmd is a very good tool with a huge quality: it works very well under linux
-pk2cmd is maintened by Microchip and supports a large number of devices

For these reasons, I decided to support pk2cmd as an external programming engine, exactly like pkp or pk2 was already supported. Pikdev V1.0.0 supported a modified version of pk2cmd (still available on my download page).

Since Pikdev V1.1.0, you can use an unmodified copy of pk2cmd (Version>=1.20.0), directly available from Microchip Website, or from my download page.

Some extra capabilities of PICkit 2 programmer, such as device power up/down and firmware downloading are also supported.

I would like to thank Walter Kicinski (the developper of pk2cmd) to have accepted to add in his program the changes I needed for using pk2cmd from a GUI.

Note: Help for the support of PicKit3 is welcome because PicKit2 tends to be outdated

See here the list of devices supported by the built-in programming engine.

See also here the list of devices supported by the picKit2 USB programmer.

Please report your experiences with these devices.

History of versions (current version is V1.4.0)