I decided to give I²C a last final effort, which included tons of searching on the internet. The problem is that other than the start and stop bits, the interrupts are never triggered. I double-checked so many things and actually found a few things to fix, although it didn't really make any difference with the results.

So after reading about SPI since last night, I was able to figure out the code for the Arduino and get that programmed pretty easily as a master and set it up to send out data every half second. I did some reading about the PIC and got that set up so it initialized and would dis...

[img workspace.jpg||right]It's been a while since I updated. I ended up putting the logic analyzer onto a circuit board a while back and it works fine. I was still trying to get I²C working between my arduino and PIC chip, but still have been unsuccessful in even the simplest communication. I set up an LCD display that shows what the 1-byte values of up to 4 registers are. I also set up a second chip to attempt PIC to PIC communication via I²C and even hooked up another LCD display to that one, but after further investigation I'm going to look into trying SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface). SPI...

Well, I ended up building a logic analyzer this morning. I found an older laptop that I wasn't using for anything that had a parallel port and I built a simple analyzer out of a parallel cable. The design on the site called for a 74HC245 chip, which I didn't have, so I substituted it with some other chips based on how it was wired up. I ended up using 3 74LS04 Hex inverter chips and paired 2 inverters per input (8 inputs total) to create buffers, which is all the other chip was used for anyhow. However, I needed +5v and the parallel port was only providing about +3v, so I wired a PS/2 cable in...

Well, not much progress today for the most part. The 2 are communicating, but the results don't seem to be what I keep expecting. This morning, I originally thought one of the chips I had was bad, but it seems they got a little messed up when I tried writing to them without power plugged into my programmer. Doing an erase, a full read, and then a write (with power) seemed to fix it and once I figured that out, I haven't had any problems. This would be so much easier with a logic analyzer, but I don't have one, and I don't have the money to buy any parts to make one (at least not based on the d...

It looks like I may have been a bit hasty. I decided to continue working on the project some more and here's what I've done in the last couple weeks and what my plans are at this point. I did end up bonding the bumper together, but when I was working on getting some metal for reinforcements fitted, I ended up snapping the bumper in half, so that's something I need to work on still. I continued working on fixing the breakout board for the dsPIC in case I could get that working. I came up with a wonderful technique (although very difficult still) of repairing the circuit board traces of such sma...

I've put the work on hold for the most part at this point. I'm currently working on repairing the body of the car from the crash. Currently the front bumper is mostly intact using JB Weld to hold it together. After that, I plan on reinforcing it with metal so that it can withstand an impact again without crumpling. As for the electronics, I'm holding off on working on that for now while I get some other things done in my life.

I changed the code so that it blinked a bicolor LED between green and red. It was having trouble and operating erratically. First I tried programming a second chip with no success, and then I ended up mounting all the components on a different breadboard. They seemed to work much more consistently on the new board. I'm now at a point where I'm doing more reading so I can start making use of the timer. Once I get that figured out, I'll work on getting 1 channel read and change the light between red, green, or both depending on the position of the control. After that, getting multiple channels w...

After doing some reading, it sounds like I²C will fit the bill after all. Hopefully I'll be able to make some more progress on this over the upcoming weekend.

I made some progress tonight. I've been doing a bunch of research on various settings for the PIC18 series chips such as what the various fuses are and how to get it to run with the internal oscillator and use PLL (phase locked loop) to multiply the clockspeed by 4 to get a total of 32MHz. I had thrown together some code last week and uploaded it to the chip, but when I tested it, the LED didn't seem to blink. When I tried the program in a SPICE simulator, it seemed to run ok, so I wasn't sure what was wrong. I fixed my power supply, from which the voltage regulator had been resoldered numerou...

Last night I found a copy of the C18 compiler I had downloaded, copied and pasted a sample program into mplab and compiled it successfully. After that, I uploaded it to the chip successfully, erased my buffer, and read it back from the chip successfully, so my adhoc adaptor is working fine. Just FYI, my adaptor is just a breadboard with wires going to my programmer on corresponding pins for Vcc, Vss, MCLR, PGD, PGC, and PGM. At least it gets the job done. The next step is to get a program I had written for the PIC16F84a ported to the new chip and updated so it can be read via I²C. Once that's ...