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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

I hope there is a follow up where the LED is ground down and a PICKIT2 is used to read out the code :)

PicKit2 and MPLAB8 made MCU programming a pleasure. Everything was so damn snappy and responsive. Feels as though everything went downhill with the advent of PicKit3 and MPLABX.

Edit: The site only exists on the wayback machine now, but there was a hate page [1] for the PicKit3 posted on Dave Jones' twitter some time ago

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180423225612/http://www.fuckit...

I don't buy the PIC chip theory since that means it's either programmed in-situ which seems imposible, or they're ordered with premasked or preprogrammed ROM which is hellishly expensive.

It could also be programmed during production. Clearly the LED manufacturer has the equipment to do wire bonding, so why not use the occasion to program it too?

It'd be a bit comparable to the test and assembly process of the WS2812B, see [0] @ 2:30 or 6:10.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMjhJ9kcaU4

Anything is possible, I suppose, but burning EEPROM is an order of magnitude slower than anything these robots are doing.

I'm not too worried about that. The slowest part of EEPROM & flash operation is erasing an already-used page - and that's not the case here.

Chips like these only have 1kB of flash - I'd be surprised if you couldn't program them in less than 100ms.

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