A friend and I were trying to do some very basic things with a couple of 18f452 PICs, like make an LED flash etc and we are now stuck. We programmed it with a simple loop program that turns a port on and off (to make an LED on one of the port's pins flash) and connected a 20MHz resonator with two 22pF capacitors for the oscillator circuit, across OSC1 and 2. Our power source is about 5V but probably has about 2V error.
The first time we tried it, it worked perfectly. But after that every single thing we've done including using the same LED program has resulted in failure.
The programmer software has stuff about fuses and as we are new to PICs and applied electronics generally we have no idea what to do. If someone could explain how durable PICs are and how badly they respond to static, varying voltages, anything else that us newbies should be looking out for, we will be seriously grateful! So far its been really frustrating. Thanks!