I decided to take an image of some of the tools that are going to be used for this project while I wait for the rest of the parts to arrive in the mail... and explain a bit about them.

This is the ICD 3 made by Microchip. I had to add a couple adaptors to make it usable but it has some very nice advantages over the pickit programmers. The first one is that it is a lot faster, the wait time is almost half when programming a device with new code. Something that I seriously appreciate.

The other primary advantage this device has is that you can set complex breakpoints when you are ready to debug your project.

In other news, I should hopefully have the parts I ordered for this project in the next couple days. I am seriously looking forward to their arrival. :)