It is my firm belief that if you continue with this addiction, that you need to bite the bullet and get yourself a pickit3. There have been numerous occasions over the past 3 years where I have had to update firmware or I bought stuff direct from Mouser and it has to be programmed by someone unlike the coops where the PICs are programmed by the coop manager. The cost will end up being rounding error based on your total investment in lights, controllers, software, and time. Besides who wants to wait for a PIC to be mailed and returned after a failure or getting a new pic when the show is supposed to be running every night and it cannot due to a PIC failure.