The worst programmer ever to grace this forum - ME!

[HankMcSpank]

I will suggest you pick up a cheap bread board or two and a hand full of LEDs, resistors, caps etc. The demo boards are nice I guess, but you can not do a whole lot with them other than what they were designed to do.

As far as the coil winding project goes. A switch on a cam or some other part will work. Every revolution the switch is "bumped" from low to high. Every time the switch is bumped a variable is incremented.

If it is not running real fast interrupts will not be needed.

LOOP:
IF SWITCH = 1 THEN
WRAP = WRAP + 1
GOTO LOOP

That is the basics. Add a serial or LCD to display the value. Add
IF WRAP = X THEN GOTO STOP ???

Let us know...

Whilst I was sold on the concept of the ease of use of the Microchip low pin count board, (esp to get me some simple quick & dirty IO) I'm now very rapidly seeing the shortcomings!

As it goes I have, breadboard & plenty of components...I'll be using all that in earnest, once I've nailed the basics here (no pun intended).

Re the coil winder. I'm using an old DC cooling fan with a drill chuck hot glued to its centre ( http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/2717/workshopjd8.jpg - ugly but fulfills a need!)....this drill chuck will hold the 'solenoid core' while to copper wire is wound onto it. On this fan will be 7 or so magnets, each in turn closing a magnetic reed switch as the motor turns (I'd imagine the maximum speed the fan will be turning at for this project will be about 200RPM I've made a simple PWM circuit to control the speed of the fan).

Where the PIC comes into the equation, is that it will count the pulses from the fan motor. For every 'X' pulses it receives from fan motor's reed switch, the PIC will send one short pulse onwards to a UCN5804 stepper motor IC. It's essentially a pulse counter/divider ...for ever x pulses received, output one pulse.

The UCN5804 feeds a small stepper motor - on its shaft is a bit of threaded nylon rod - it's over this threaded rod that the copper wire feeds onto the solenoid core (this youtube video illustrates what I'm trying to achieve well - (from about 27 seconds in).

The whole point of this is to have my wire neatly wound onto the solenoid. Since I know the diameter of the copper wire (0.15mm), & I know the pitch of the nylon rod's thread feeding the wire (1mm), it's just a fairly simple calculation. therefore for every turn of the main DC fan, I need the stepper motor threaded rod traverse the wire 0.15mm. It's a 7.5deg stepper, therefore each step of the 1mm pitch threaded rod will traverse the copper wire 0.0208mm, therefore to move the wire 0.15mm, some 7.2 steps needed are to the stepper for every turn of the main fan (since there's no such thing as 0.2 of a pulse I'll be rounding it down to 7!)

To nail this project I need to...

1. Sort out all the idiosyncracies of getting my PIC programming enviroment set up for the PIC16F690 - check! (thanks to here!)
2. Lean how to set a PIC output pin high - check!
3. Learn how to check a PIC input pin (to see if a switch has closed) - check!
4. Learn how to setup a few 'count' variables, get them incrementing (& check 'em)....acting whenever the counts have been met - still to do!
5. Learn how to output a pulse - still to do.

I'll also need to figure out some form of debounce (I may end up using a monostable chip to do this)

Thanks for your suggestion on how to approach this...I'll have a play with your lines to see if I can get the switch on my low pin count board to act as the reed switch & one of the LEDs as the stepper chip feed....ie after 7 presses of the board's button, make an LED turn on.