Computer hardware is evolving towards more specialised devices, and especially devices which fit the needs of the Internet of things, such as a low cost and a low power consumption. Due to their long history and unfading popularity, Microchip Technology’s PIC microcontrollers are strong contenders in this field. The programming process of these chips, in other words the upload of machine code into the program flash memory of the controller, is however a non-trivial issue: for example, existing solutions have a non-negligible cost and can face portability issues. In this paper, we propose an optimised method for PIC programming. Besides, our proposal also has a pedagogical virtue: we show that it could be a meaningful addition to a computer architecture lecture.