Robot's control board - how to?

I would suggest looking at one of: 1. The MAVRIC-IIB

"D. Jay Newman"

Excellent site! The modular cell phones are awesome!

One "w" too many though.

Padu

There are many ways, of course. I would use a PIC 16F877 or 876 on an Olimex board that has the serial circuit built for you. Very cheap at

BRW

Thank you all for the answers. I love sparkfun - these guys have some cool ideas :)

Merlin

That's what I'm using. :-) I've recently replaced the 16F877 with an 18F4620 though, which of course works perfectly well in the same Olimex 40 pin protoboard as the 16F877.

For programming, I use Proton+ - relatively expensive, but it produces nice, tight code, and is constantly being updated for the newest PICs - much more so than some other compiler manufacturers I can name. ;-) It has built in commands for anything you'd want - PWM, GLCDs, USB, servo control, USARTS, etc. Amazing piece of work, and you can get a robot up and running in no time at all. My current base has ultrasonic and IR sensors, a keypad for on-board programming and control, LCD, etc. All controlled by less than 100 lines of code. The Mikroelektronika compilers look nice too, but my experience is that their demos, at least, generate pretty crappy code, and have numerous bugs that even generate incorrect code for several PICs. On the other hand, the simulator is nice.

But, best of all, Microchip's sample store will get you all the free PIC's you could ever want. They don't complain even when I say that I'm just a hobbyist who will not be doing any production purchases.

- Rich

Thanks for the great info. I'll check out Proton+.

BRW