Programming the PIC
 

Over the summer, I worked with a Cerebellum, a development board for the PIC16F877 developed at CMU, and it uses the same serial port for both programming and serial communications. You just leave the PIC in it's socket, and the board has I/O pins on it. I imagine a similar setup will be used by Innovation First (considering that having everyone removing the chip, programming it, and putting it back in will probably result in several snapped pins, if not chips, during the heat of the competition)

So I went and actually looked at the sheet for the 18F8520, and it has a bus available to address an acre or two of external memory (will the IFI RC ?), 32 k of internal program memory and 2 k of variable space in RAM and 1k in EEPROM. It has hardware serial communications options including a USART (rs232,488 &c), and IsquaredC, as well as all the stuff to read the PWM inputs.

The programming for all these goodies will probably be in the library supplied with C-BOT.

The default code for the EduRC was released yesterday (10-16-03). It's available here, under Documentation.

thanks
 

Thanks to all that answered my question of where to get good teaching aids (or however exactly I phrased it). A particular thanks to those who posted links to useful sites. Overall, a good thread, and helpful to me, so thank you on the whole.

Jesse - as for our team going CVS ... maybe, we shall see ... personally I am liking MPLAB a lot, which apparently doesn't support it, so ... we will talk