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I have started to develop the quadrature decoders for my mouse, a simple circuit and is mainly programming so its something I can do to break up exam revision.

Here is a picture of the setup:

The main board is an Explorer 16 with a 32 bit PIC microcontroller in there. I have the prototype board connected to the expansion socket and I am then connecting this to the breadboard. On here is a 16F88 and some i2c eeprom. In the back you can see the icd2 programmer.

I have written the software for the 16F88 to act as a i2c slave, and the pic32 talks to it fine and displays the response on the LCD (although took a while to get it all working). The code to decode the quadrature signals from the motors is in there but there is a small bug in the 16F88’s code which triggers a read at the wrong time. The idea is the main microcontroller sets a pin high to make a copy of the current reading and reset the counter, this helps with working out the age of the reading. If I work out what going wrong then it should not be too long before I can plug a motor in and see how it performs…

I also have my LiPo batteries, and gears and wheels for the drive. I am waiting on a pillar drill stand then I can finish making a prototype of the gearbox, and finally see if the motors I have are up to the job!