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 ...

Ok, it's been a while. I've been doing things like being in a musical, playing World of Warcraft, and learning the violin that have been taking up much of my time. However, I've made some progress on my robot. First of all, I've decided to go with an Arduino Diecimila board for the main controlling board. I had attempted to create a breakout board for the dsPIC processor, but my boardmaking skills just don't seem to be good enough. Sure I could order custom boards, but that gets expensive. Anyways, the arduino was only about $40 after shipping and everything. I chose this because it's a popula...

I didn't do too much this weekend. I ended up putting the shell on and raced the car around again with my boyfriend. I also drew up a circuitboard design for the breakout board. So the next step is creating and assembling the circuitboard. Then once that's tested, I can figure out how I'm going to go about with programming it for the time being. I'm hoping I can just connect it to my existing programmer by building some kind of interface. After that I can start breadboarding out the actual circuitry. I also need to find a high-level block diagram I drew up for how the circuit will interact, al...

I went ahead and bought the remainder of the parts although I ended up needing to stop at 2 Radioshacks to get everything. I went ahead and put together some wiring adapters and finished hooking everything up. I recalibrated the steering and had to reverse the direction of the ESC through the remote, although I could have simply switched the colored wires. I used velcro to hold the battery cover in place and after putting the cover over the electronics and securing the extra antenna wire, it was ready to go. So I went ahead and took it outside to get an idea of it's capabilities. It raced just...