I’ll have to try that @dorth , but I couldn’t even get Putty to work with my FTDI friend (TTL Serial) device hooked to the TX pin and GND on the Core. It works perfectly in the Arduino IDE’s serial monitor, but Putty just makes a computer “beep” anytime I try to open a serial port. I think I spent about 30mins this morning messing with it, and searching the web. I couldn’t really find a good reason why it just “beeps” and doesn’t connect. The Arduino IDE is ok, but that’s kind of more memory hogging than I want for just a serial monitor.
In my opinion… Serial debugging over USB should be a fairly high priority to get working well for everyone… because once you go a little beyond dead simple programs, you need visibility of your code variables and execution state to figure out why something isn’t working. I’ve always loved real time debugging ability that about the Arduino provides, something even the fancy expensive Microchip dev tools can’t do. Even if you set up a UART on your PIC uC, the Real ICE and ICD3 and MPLAB IDE can’t handle monitoring the data, even though it’s already connected to the computer via USB.