How do I give a radio control car autonomous control

[Kenjones1935]

I hate .pdf reference manuals. I will stay with the group and purchase PIC BASIC (according to the picture it comes with both a CD and a real 20th Century paper manual). PIC BASIC LITE does not appear in the Microchip SEARCH engine. Oh, well. What's another $250? (I just paid $374 for the left tail light of my car. It comes as one big assembly. All I did was break the red plastic lens!)

I was intimidated by the 270 page and 290 page .pdf files which purported to tell me all I need to know to write in MPASM.

I have coded in assembly, in Pascal, in C and C++ (even fortran way back when). Never in Basic. I hope you guys a patient.

Ken

[mackrackit]

Glad to see you are sticking around.

I have coded in assembly, in Pascal, in C and C++ (even fortran way back when). Never in Basic. I hope you guys a patient.

Melanie is the only one to worry about.
I hear she has a whip

[Kenjones1935]

The demo PIC Assembly programs are straight forward. I understood them. They work.

I was happy to discover that the HI-TECH PICC lite integrates into MPLAB IDE easily. It offers a demo program that is much more complicated than the assembly shots. It worked here in sunny scenic Fitchburg Mass.

The MPLAB IDE contains another free C compiler. We'll see what it offers.

Ken

[Kenjones1935]

I ordered five DPDT relay switches early last week from Newark. They have not arrived yet. I have not prototyped a digital/analog circuit is over thirty years. We used wire wrap in the day. Yesterday I bought from Radio Shack solder, a low power iron, some small tools, and three different kinds of proto boards. It is not obvious how we physically attach capacitors, resistors, transistors, to these boards. I gather the inline chips get plugged into sockets that have pins which fit into these proto boards. Their back sides are designed for some kind of wire attachment. Wire wrap?

Can you guys point me to some revealing photographs?

Ken

[mackrackit]

Can you give the Radio Shack part number or picture of what you have?

[Byte_Butcher]

Hi Ken,
When I build prototype projects (that aren't SMD), I usually build them on "perfboard" or "punchboard" or" Vectorboard" or whatever it's called these days.
It's just epoxy glass board with holes punched on a .100" grid.
Stuff the parts in from the top, bend the leads over on the bottom and solder...

Here's a top view of a simple "vectorboard project":



And bottom:


That's a simple board, but I've done some pretty large and complex circuits using that method and it's worked well for me for over 30 years now.

Put your IC's in sockets so that you can replace them easily if something "bad" happens.

Good luck! And have lots of fun!


steve

[Kenjones1935]

Thank you for the pictures. They gave me some perspective and jogged my memory.

I bought at Radio Shack a Prepunched Perfboard (Steve's picture), a Component PC Board (780 indexed holes) and a Component PC Board (750 solder ringed holes).

The Prepunched Perfboard is what Steve uses. Do the solder ringed holes do the same thing only easier? I gather the indexed holes work well with DIPs.

I am looking at the PICKIT 2. I expected room for four screw sized holes to attach standoffs to hold another board. Does glue work on these boards? I've got a glue gun. I had hoped to prototype the actual RC car with it.

Ken