Hello all,

Here I go again. Working on a project...Digitizing Arm...and needing to count pulses from 6 encoders. The encoders will be counted in quadrature, therefore, I will need to monitor interrupts from 24 different lines...

Each encoder:
Lines: 500
Counts: 2000 (in quadrature)
Gear Reduction: 10.8:1
Total Counts: 21600

WORD sized variable to hold counts

Here is my question(s):

Using DT Ints portB change interrupts, am I led to believe I am going to need 3 individual pics to achieve 24 portB lines, or is there a slicker way to get my 24 IO lines that have interrupt on change?
Should I run 6 pics (1 per encoder) to keep the counts super accurate?

The plan calls for a button to be on the stylus, and upon a button press, the counts from each encoder will be sent to the pc via RS232, to be processed into a point cloud for SolidWorks.

If I run 1 pic, the serial stream would be a piece of cake...

If I run 6 pics, does it not get a little tricky?
Maybe a "master" pic collecting the data from all the encoder pics...then
the "master" sending all the counts to the pc?...
OR
All encoder pics sharing the same TX line and "bus busy" line, therefore when an encoder pic is transmitting, it will pull the "bus busy" line high, halting other encoder pics from their transmissions?

I guess I'll stop here and see what thoughts I get.

As far as code thoughts..I'm good there. I guess I'm seeking hardware thoughts at this stage.
I think tracking the encoder counts is the most important aspect of this project...

Any thoughts at this point, are good thoughts!

Thanks all,

Chris