5 articles were written in January 2014:

I already own a PICkit2 clone for a while, and it worked without problems. But since it has been deprecated by Microchip for several years now, it doesn’t get any updates anymore. And so I found several times that it just doesn’t properly support the PIC chip I wanted to use. One can compile the pk2cmd application on Linux, to get at least programming support (it seems to be updated from time to time). But when used from MPLabX, only limited device support is available. And there is no PIC32 support at all.

So when I saw the updated QFP protoboard from Dangerousprototypes, I thought I might have a go on building my own PK3. The schematics for it are available from Microchip (in the user guide), and the needed firmware can be found in the PICkit3 scripting tool package. So I spent my Free PCB coupon on this board, and started another project.