You might consider gray-coding instead of counting if your resolution does not have to be too fine.
(For example, for eight positions, 000 001 011 010 110 111 101 100)

Doug Hewett
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex [mailto:aturner13@TRIAD.RR.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 8:45 AM
To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Antenna Controller


I am a newbie to using PICs and have been reading and experimenting using
Mike Predko's book and some others. I have decided that a project would be
the best way to get further involved and get more experience.
I would like to build an improved controller for an amateur radio antenna
that I use.
It has a large variable capacitor that is motor driven. The control box has
four buttons; up, down and coarse,fine. This cause pulses to be sent to the
motor and the capacitor turns the capacitor to tune. I would like to use a
PIC so that some of the points in the tuning range could be stored and
returned to without the "manual" tuning that I have to do now.
The two things that change are capacitance and angular rotation. I suppose
angular rotation would be easiest to store,but would mean adding something
to the shaft that could be counted. The rotation is about 80 degrees and has
switches that indicate the end of travel.
I  know this is asking a lot for a new guy, but if you could just point me
to some other projects that might be similar or suggestions in general how
to do it.
One last question. I have been using assembler and the Epic programmer, but
would Basic or C make my life easier especially with bigger projects. I have
some programming experience with both.

Thanks very much

Alex

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--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.