I FRIED MY PICKit2!

[brad]

What is an ftdi cable?

[Chuckt]

Some boards use a serial to USB cable.

An FTDI cable is USB to RS-232 and I think the TTL signals are converted on some project boards for it to work. I bought a Nokia cell phone cable for about $3-4 dollars because it had the FTDI chip in it and all I will have to do is add a transistor, two resistors and possibly a small capacitor to make it work on another pic after some surgery. There are FTDI cables for 3.3 and 5 volts.

[brad]

What would you use that for?

Have you looked into using the built in UART?

[bitfogav]

This is another way of programming chips like the Arduino and AVR stuff..

most of them have something called a boot loader on them.

Check out this website it has a cool game system using a RGB 8x8 matrix and you can even download games for it, this game system uses a FTDI cable so you can program it..

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/meggyjr

[brad]

So that cable connects to the USB PORT via the ftdi chip?

[bitfogav]

yes one end is usb and the other end is a 6pin connector, and in the cable there is a ftdi chip of some sort.