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Some random thoughts on how I do things...

Microprocessors

First of all, I use PIC microprocessors for almost every electronics project I make. I do all my development on Linux, so no MPLAB for me. Instead I use gputils as my assembler/linker and picp as my programing software. For programmer hardware I have an Olimex MCP-USB Picstart+ clone. This is a pretty good combo, and supports a lot of different PIC chips.

For the 18F PICs I perfer to use a C compiler instead of writing everything in assembler. There is only one opensource and usable C compiler I know of for PICs, SDCC. I've done most of my work with version 2.5.0, which quite frankly sucks. That version has some major bugs with 16bit PIC chips and is damn near unusable for 14bit. However version 2.6.0 has just been released, on July 31st, and I haven't used that yet. It says that 14bit and 16bit support have both been improved tremendously, and I've talked to developers who say the same thing. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm very hopefull.

Making circuit boards

I use gschem for my schematic capture. It works fairly well, though it took me awhile to fully understand how to make new components and the like. Closely integrated with it is my pcb layout program, the terribly named pcb software. Why it was renamed pcb from xpcb I really wonder... They could have named it KoalaPCB or something so you could google it. In any case it's kinda clunky but it's fully open source and has no limitations on board size unlike Eagle. The main problem you'll run into is figuring out the footprint system. There is very little good documentation on what footprint to specify for what sort of part, be it DIP, SMD or whatever. It was very confusing for me when I started out!

Once I finish a design and have decided I'm happy with it, things get a lot simpler. I go to www.barebonespcb.com I've ordered hundreds of dollars worth of boards from them, and every one comes back perfect and quickly. The bare bones deal is one of the cheapest deals you can get. The only drawback is no soldermask or silkscreen, but for what I do that's not critical. Over all I'm happy with Advanced Circuits and ordered through them is very simple. Use them.

What is the technical name of the connector used for ICSP cables? (and more about ordering from digikey)

Molex KK connector

I'm planning on turning this into a whole mini-book one day... If you want to be able to build nice, professional, repeatable electronics you gotta be able to order stuff from Digikey or one of the other big parts suppliers. My best advice for this is stick it out, it's tough, annoying, but eventually you'll figure out what, exactly you are supposed to be ordering.

As for that part... It's a Molex KK connector.