XD i'm writing my microswitch guide in the library too... its work i tells ya!!!
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Hey it seams as though where devaloping things at the same time. I have just been playing with trasmitting serial data over a wire interface between 2 micro's. I have noticed one issue that I haven't solved yet. the serin command seams to wait forever if it doesn't receive anything, so how would you failsafe it? as if you lost comms when you where telling the bot to go forward it would just stay going forward.

yep, this is looking like a bit of a problem!

I'm trying to find out of there's a way to get a similar serial input happening with a timeout or something.

Maybe I'll just have to write the serial input part from scratch instead of using the inbuilt functions.

I'm thinking of trying a normal RC style pulse train over the 433MHz modules too, just to see how well it works. It's not as flexible as a data stream, but it's easier in some ways
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

pulsin and pulsout work over a wire link at least. I've got 1 micro sending pulses and the other receiving them and moving a servo

yeah that's what I'm doing now, but I'll be sending multiple channels over the one link - so it'll end up being fairly similar to a normal old school R/C setup.

edit: I have the transmitter working nicely, giving out a pulse train with the 3 channels and a sync pulse, similar to what normal R/C sets do.
The receiver part is pretty much the same as the normal servo input PWM controller, but it'll also need to decode the channels.

I just had a 2am idea about the serial link system though.
The only real problem with it is that the input function can get stuck, as mentioned, so there's no way of killing the output if the signal is lost.
The solution is of course pretty obvious!
A hardware watchdog (either a watchdog chip, or a basic resistor, capacitor, transistor setup) can look at an output pin giving a pulse on each successful receive, and if anything goes wrong with either the signal, the processor, or the software it'll kill the ouput to the FET driver.
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

w00t!

I now have a working serial transmitter that does mixing with the flick of a switch
The idea behind this is that I can use the same controllers in different bots (or cars, boats, ertc) and enable mixing on the transmitter if I need it.

Once I have the receiver part working 100% and tested I'll post the code
If I have problems with the serial link system I have designed the code to make it very easy to convert to a pulse train output like traditional R/C systems.

I'll also have a PICaxe servo channel mixer working very soon if anyone's interested in those for driving tank control from normal R/C sets.
I reckon I could make and sell them for $15 or so easily.
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

You either have too much time on your hands at work or they pay you too much

Good work Andrew! Will be interested when you build that Telemetry unit
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

I've had some pretty quiet days at work lately
They don't mind me doing this kind of stuff since it's relevant to a lot of what we do anyway.

The mixing stuff was done between 2am and 3am last night though

The TX is working really nicely, but the RX doesn't get the right values for some reason.
It's picking up the data, and the values are stable, but they're offset by about 20.
It's very weird.
I'll try connecting the TX and RX by a cable instead of the RF modules to test it more, but I might need to slow down the transmission or something to make sure it's catching the data reliably.

It's kind of fun seeing how much can be done with the little 08M chips

What would you want the telemetry unit to do?
It's mega easy to read Dallas 1 wire thermometer chips with the PICaxe, but it's probably better to use thermistor sensors on analog inputs instead (smaller sensors, etc).

How would you like to receive the data?
PC, or a small LCD?
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

Well I think 4 temp sensors would be good. 2 motor sensors, 1 battery sensor, 1 speed controller sensor.

LED's would be good to me, Green, Yellow & Red. Green for up to 60'c, Yellow up to 90'c and Red from there after. Would give rough indications on when things are going wrong when you can glance infront of you and see your left drive motor is showing red and the right is showing green...
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way to make it not doable on the 08M

actually it'd be pretty easy to multiplex inputs onto one ADC with an external analog switch chip.
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The Engine Whisperer - fixer of things

Well the 08M has 3 ADC inputs. That is 1 Thermositor sensor per ADC and that leaves you the SerOut pin to send the data to a 18X which switches on tri-color LED's....

Simple When can I expect it in the mail j/k
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I discovered the out by 20 problem a few days ago (check the tnp build thread) just add 20 to the output before the servo command.

Silicon chip did an artical on sending temperature data wirelessly using picaxes which may be some use...
i can just imagine nick getting his fancy new radio and us having the same telemetry using your device!
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Originally posted by NMO:
I discovered the out by 20 problem a few days ago (check the tnp build thread) just add 20 to the output before the servo command.

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Well I think 4 temp sensors would be good. 2 motor sensors, 1 battery sensor, 1 speed controller sensor.

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Well the 08M has 3 ADC inputs. That is 1 Thermositor sensor per ADC

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Well I can ditch one sensor on the speed controller because the Sidewinder is current limited
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