Hello, I'm Kestutis from Lithuania. I'm actually a software engineer, but it always seemed like it's just not enough, something was missing in the equation and so, a little less then a year ago I got myself involved into electronics.
Started low with simple stuff until I stumbled upon arduino (yes that same arduino everyone most likely know). From there on I got literally hooked with micros, though I kind of hated the arduino IDE and the variation of C, so I decided that I would go for programming in vanilla C which I was fairly familiar with from work and everyday life, so I bought myself an ATJTagICE 3 and it was all fun and dandy until I found myself in need of USB controller on a µC and it so happened that I wasn't able to find a DIP packaged AVR chip for that purpose, not to mention the QFP and QFN ones having so much unneeded stuff on them in addition to the USB that it was an overkill. Simply put, I decided to go the PIC route for this and so, thought about buying a PICKit and needed some advice about buying it, what actually led me to this forum (Not to mention that I was a fan of EEVBlog on youtube from the day I got into electronics, even if that was not that long ago).