Well Spencer if you want to know about any of it just give me a yell. Or, better yet if you are going to Buckeye or the Championship come over to 1024, ask for Q and I'll help you out in person.
Once you learn the hardware... you'll love the hardware... you can do so much cool stuff! It takes the mystique away from things like PWM too, lets you see how downright simple it is.... not to mention gives you the capability of updating PID's at 100Hz as opposed to 38Hz.... and don't forget the extra resolution!
Anyhow.... if you all have any questions about onboard peripherals (i.e. CCP's, Timers, ADCs, UARTS, etc), or anything of the kind, give me a yell, always glad to help.
one last thing... if anybody is having the encoder blues of too fast of an interrupt rate or not enough resolution, try out
the analog encoders by US digital.... they are awesome... about 1008 counts of resolution and you don't need to sample them very fast at all... only about 4 times per revolution, unless you figure out a better driver that needs less... for us, to get resolution of about 0.1" the encoder only needs to be sampled at 90Hz and goes up to about 80~90Hz.... which paired perfectly with the PID and PWM update rate of my CCP based high frequency PWM driver.
*whew* ok well i need to get some sleep, sure there'll be plenty of coding to do come tomorrow morning. good luck to everybody else who at boilermaker this weekend!
-q