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 done, I'll probably make a custom circuit board that allows me to just plug in jumper wires from the receiver to the chip and have another set of jumper pins to communicate with the arduino via I²C. After that, writing a control program for the arduino should be quite easy assuming everything works as planned. I'm not sure if I already mentioned this, but there were 2 main reasons I am using a separate chip to read the pwm signals: