Yea, Oh Boy. That means....lets see...Divide by 2 ....carry the one...$450 bucks. I bought my PM3 for $45.44 on ebay. I will deal with a little flakeyness for that price difference. I suspect you might also.
John, you're good guy. Thank you.

Yor're welcome FWIW.

Keep us updated on your progress with your project and MPLABX. I'm trying to decide what to do on one myself. In fact, this AM, I fired up XC8 and translated a module from MPASM to C. It worked fine and generated pretty good code. But, changing the test array of char to an array of structs, while it compiled fine and made decent code, would not display the values of the struct elements in a watch window. Exactly like a recent problem with floats that just got fixed this week. Same problem, different data type. WTF

Good Luck!

 

Update on the PM3 (10-00359) issue

I did a bad bad thing........I let Microchip update the bios and OS on my PM3. Before, it occasionally had a programming issue that was fixed with a reboot or a restart. After the update, I have to cycle power on the PM3 and program twice (first program fails) to get a good load. (I tried every thing that worked before.)

I am glad I had enough sense to walk away from the computer for a few hours.

Instead of driving up to Phoenix to Microchip to find the right desk to stand on top of to scream insults about the persons parentage who wrote this code, I decided to try finding a fix, and I think I got one.

If you have a older model PM3 (10-00359) and are using it with MPLAB X and are having problems with the PM3 not accepting a new build but programming the previous build, do the following:
- Right click on the title of the current project in the project window.
Select - Set Configuration
Select - Customize
- In the left window select - PM3
- In the right window select "Auto Select Memory and Ranges"
change it to "Manually select Memory and Ranges"

- Put a check in the box next to "Preserve Program Memory".

You will have to do this for each project.

This worked for me.

Mark

Edit: Oh Yea, never never never let those S#Bs update the code in your PM2. They want to sell new PM3s and they are willing to break yours to make that happen.