From Thursday through the long weekend...

We met everyday from Thursday through Monday (yes, even President's day) to continue development of our project. Our mission was to continue working upon our code of making a LED light blink, but instead of having it already programmed into the pic, we wanted to use the USB interface to control the blinking. Ideally, we wanted to have a system working such that if we plugged in the USB cable attached to our bread board (on which the Pic is connected), the connected PC would detect the "new hardware" that we had just connected, and then would allow us to use some sort of GUI to control the LED.

To prepare for this, extensive reading was done. We also turned an MC1455 into a 20MHz oscillator. However, though the resistor and capacitor values we used to achieve this seems to be correct, after using an oscilloscope, we found that it was only running at 2MHz. We are unsure whether this was an error in the oscilloscope, or in the equation we used to try and create the oscillator. Now, we have created a 4MHz oscillator to act as our external oscillator, and further testing will see if we need to change this as well. We have an old satellite receiver, on which has three crystal oscillators, but we are unsure of whether they work or not. Nevertheless, we have managed to de-solder one of them, and will test it on the oscilloscope to test its actual frequency rate. In the worst case, we will go out to Action Electronics and purchase an oscillator from them.