I hope you are able to share the final (or near) result. The home A/V 
remote control situation is getting out of hand, with some of the 
commercial equipment expensive and then may not do what you need. :)

Timothy Weber wrote:
> wouter van ooijen wrote:
>   
>>> Interesting question.  Let me put some context on it: This is 
>>> Compulsory 
>>> Electronics Project #7: Making my obsessively ideal 
>>> living-room remote 
>>> control.  It has one PIC16F916 on the battery-powered remote 
>>> that reads 
>>> buttons and talks to an XBee radio; one 16F688 on the 
>>> mains-powered base 
>>> that talks to the receiving XBee; and an additional 12F675 
>>> there that's 
>>> dedicated to driving IRLEDs.  All are currently on small breadboards.
>>>       
>> I am lazy. IMHO this is good in a software (systems) engineer :)
>>     
>
> Yes!  Laziness is gospel!
>
>   
>> In your place I would either
>> - use chips that can write themselves, and arrange for a bootloading
>> scheme,
>>     
>
> The savings would be two flying leads (async and ground) instead of 
> five, yes?  And the cost would be code space (two of these are small 
> chips), as well as complexity (I haven't used a bootloader before)?
>
>   
>> - make sure I could ICSP the chips in-situ (maybe with a very long USB
>> or  RS232 cable), or
>>     
>
> I don't have a computer in the living room, so those cables would have 
> to be what, 50-100 m to snake throughout the house!
>
>   
>> - duplicate the setup on my desktop (and arrange for multiple
>> programmers and/or bootloading)
>>     
>
> Which is something I've considered.  But the hardware is still in flux, 
> so that's a little extra time to build it plus extra headaches 
> diagnosing the things I forget to copy over to the other board.  And 
> anyway, even if I duplicated the breadboards, I'd have to duplicate the 
> DVD player and stereo amp in order to do a *full* system test!
>
> I think the moral here is that the laziest option often depends on what 
> you've done before.
>   
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