John,

I got the following from a Mike Green on the Parallax forum. I think he is agreeing with your decision to migrate up from the Basic Stamp.

With my 1/10 hobby car came a three channel RC unit. One for the DC drive motor, one for the steering servo, and a spare. I thought I could use the spare for the auto/RC toggle. This car is just an experiment to get a working prototype. Once that is done I might be able to find some money for a "real" prototype. There is quite a bit to consider in selecting the race car/truck itself. What do I want to teach about suspensions? I'm not sure.
----------Mike wrote----------
"There is no mechanism for the Stamp to automatically sample the RC channels. Typically you'd use a sequence of 3 PULSIN statements, one for each channel. The RC receiver normally receives one channel at a time and the PWM signals occur in sequence and repeat about 50 times a second. There's not much time left to do control functions once you account for timing 3 RC receive channels and 3 servo PWM output channels. It's possible to offload the PWM output functions, but I don't know any ready-to-go PWM input processor.

"I would strongly suggest you look at the Propeller. It can easily do the RC receiver timing and the servo PWM generation with two cogs (processors) and have plenty of processing power to do whatever control functions you need. The Propeller Servo Controller is a compact board that comes pre-programmed with a 16 channel servo controller, but the outputs can also be used as inputs by modifying the control program."

My next step is to examine the Propeller.

Thanks again..
Ken