[JLambert]

Our robot from this year had an external circuit using a Microchip microcontroller. The microcontroller collected wheel rotational data, and the robot controller would send a request every loop to the circuit. Upon the request, the circuit would send data collected so far.

The chip was programmed in C, so it's not excessively complicated. We primarily had trouble just getting the two to talk at the same baud rate. I'm honestly not sure of how exactly it was done, because I was more involved with the primary programming of the robot, but I'll find out more later.