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 small width. I took some scrap pieces of wire that were left over from a null modem cable I made this past week (for a Sun Server I had aquired and finally got around to getting it up and running). From that wire, I used one filament of the stranded wire, which happened to be about the width of the trace (I had to do this under a magnifying glass), and soldered it along several of the traces. Unfortunately, about 25 of the traces were in need of repair and I still have about 5-10 more to do. I ended up giving up on that for now and went back to the arduino and PIC chip that I had settled on.

[img picprogrammer.jpg||left] I'm currently in the middle of getting the 2 to talk via I²C. I've been having to do a lot of reading on the implementation for both circuits (the arduino is much simpler). With the PIC chip, when I was trying to write the program onto it, I started having difficulties with intermittant errors. Keep in mind that I had a breadboard with wires plugged from various pins on the chip to the socket in the programmer since it was originally made for 18-pin chips and I only had a 40-pin adapter. I discovered that if I plugged the wires in via the 40 pin adapter, it worked perfectly since it had a couple resistors and capacitors on it (which I can't remember is hooked up to what). Because of the inconvenience of the wires, I went ahead and built a 28 pin to 40 pin adapter that attached right on top of the other adapter since the pinouts for the 28-pin chip were almost exactly the same as the 40-pin chip. So, this is where I leave off tonight. Hopefully I can finally get I²C communications working tomorrow.