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April 20, 2006
BoohBah
Stephen and I finally got the RF circuit working. We ended up using the old PIC18F452 instead of the 12675 (8 pin, internal clock). I wanted to share an anecdote about why this thing ended up working. We had an LED on the receive pin of the RF receiver so we could see if we were getting data. It would blink when data was coming in. When I program, there's never any partial data loss. If x=5, x will stay five unless I make it 4. It will never turn into 4.99.
This isn't the case with electricity. The RF receiver was receiving information (data) in the form of electricity, and the light was taking some of that electricity to run the debugging 'routine'. Thus the data was corrupted when it made it to the pic chip. Information was being used to light a light instead of to make a branching decision.
The lesson here is to separate your debugging from function and not take shortcuts.
It works!
Posted by mb2811 at April 20, 2006 02:10 PM