The joys and follies of using sample code

When designing something you very seldom start completely from scratch. Being an engineer means taking things that already exist and applying them in new ways. Computers would not be nearly as powerful today if every time one was put together the processor, memory, keyboard, mouse, display, and everything else were designed from scratch. That would suck. Reduce your effort by reusing things that exist. Recycle!

Unfortunately, recycling can be hard. For project FLIER I am currently wrestling with code provided by Microchip to drive USB communication. The problem with this code is that it is meant for particular demo boards. I don't have a demo board. I just have my PIC sitting on a breadboard. That means that I have to understand how Microchip's code works, sift through all of the files, pick out the important ones, possibly write new ones from scratch, and eventually cross my fingers and hope that I did not miss anything. This will be the focus of my work on this project for the foreseeable future. Still, it is better than starting from scratch!