Quote:
Originally Posted by lynca
whether you are using a PIC18F722, AVR or another microcontroller, your C code will be very similar, the PIN names might change but if your willing to learn another micocontroller's ".h" file , then don't worry about porting to a new microcontroller. More importantly, you should consider the processing speed performance and the available peripherals (CAN, I2C..etc) and the I/O options (ADC, DAC ...etc)
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I understand this point - but I believe certain differences do exist in the way the processors handle things such as interrupts. At the same time, for those of us who tend to use things such as timers or counters, relearning how can be slightly annoying. For the students involved, its often nice to have consistency between the co processor and the main processor.
As for IFI - why? It's not like the board design is complicated nor ingenious. It simply a PIC with some software, and a master processor which has a relay to control the outputs of the user processor.
Our team has a similar board which was designed by a mentor to have almost identical capabilities to the IFI board, it has PWM headers along with analog/digital in/out abilities. At the same time, it has other robotics specific features such as a 2 channel counter for quadrature encoders.
This isn't considered anything especially complex to do - nor is it unique. Even if the ICD2 header was open, and someone reversed engineered it, people would be required to purchase and use the KOP boards anyways, and I haven't heard of anyone buying the RCs separately for use in other applications.