Hi All,

I've been reading the list for a couple of weeks now, although I've not
actually used a pic before.

I'm a programmer really, but have a fair degree of electronics experience.

I am doing some consultancy for a company at the moment. They have a need to
measure displacement of a vehicle suspension, at bang on 50Hz. They have so
far set up an elaborate system which moves a PC mouse, and tried to create
windows software to read the mouse position 50 times per second. However,
they've been having great difficulty in reading at that frequency, and in
particular, reading without a fair degree of variance over the frequency.

I have been hired to help them out. The main problem they're having is the
way windows works. It's not a Real Time Operating system, and the internal
clock pulse of the NT kernal has a period of 7.5ms, which makes it really
hard to do anything in real time at a frequency whose period is not a
multiple of that.

I had considered that a solution to the problem might be to use a PIC. To
replace the mouse as the displacement sensor with a simple rheostat device,
through an op amp and into an ADC on a PIC. The pic could then send the
sampled data down a serial port, to the PC, for storage and processing.

My question to you is whether the PIC is suitable for this Real-time
operation? Am I likely to be able to get a PIC to sample at 50Hz with a 1%
error margin of frequency? Or should I be looking elsewhere for solutions?

Thanks

Jon

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