Quote Originally Posted by dragons_fire View Post
so now i added on the parallax ping ultrasonic sensor, and its messing something up. heres the short code for the sensor:

PulsOut ultra, 5
PulsIn ultra, 1, ping

"ultra is the port, and ping is the distance variable. the pulsin line seems to work, and the LED lights on the ping sensor, but everytime i send the pulsout command, it sends wierd characters to the LCD, and the "ping" variable doesnt change from 0.... the LCD is on portf.0 and the ping sensor is on portf.1.... the traces are fairly far apart, and there is nothing touching them.

if i delete the pulsout line, everything displays where its supposed too, and the ping var = 0...
Those ultrasonic transducers generate some fairly high voltages while doing their work. I can easily see one of those dumping current across traces and causing your problems. Maybe try putting a series resistor inline with portf.0 and see what happens. Don't run the transducer, start low on the resistance, work your way up until the LCD doesn't work anymore, then back off one or two values. Then fire up the transducer and see what happens...
Have you ever been 'bit' by one? I wouldn't touch the bare metal on it while it's doing it's 'transducing'.