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 popular platform with a lot of code available for it and there's nothing to build for the main unit. I also purchased an oscilloscope, so that should help me with reading signals.

I've been playing around with how to get everything set up and I did lose a bunch of my diagrams, but I do have a lot of stuff in my head still. My current decision is to use the Arduino as the main board and for reading the PWM signals from the RC control, I'm going to use a PIC18LF2620 chip with some custom code and will communicate the values to the arduino via I²C. This is a 28 pin chip, so it's relatively small and I already have it. Also, it's in a DIP package, so it's easy to prototype with breadboard. My main challenge will be throwing together an adhoc adaptor to my programmer since it only does 18 and 40 pin chips, but I don't think that should be too difficult. I'll post further if I make any additional progress. The next step is to get the PIC chip working.

Ok, I put together an adhoc adaptor for the PIC chip on a breadboard with wires and tested an initialization and that seemed to work. The next step is to write a simple test program and see if I can write it to the chip successfully. I need to download and install the Microchip C18 compiler to do that and I'll probably take care of that tomorrow.