Velleman 8048
I’ve gone and bought myself a PIC Chip programmer to play about with. Its the Velleman 8048 kit and comes with a 16F627 PIC.
I am intending to hopefully use a PIC Chip to replace the two chips used in the current Optoelectronic Apogee detector circuit.The supplied PIC has both a onboard comparator and Pulse width modulation on some of the outputs, meaning that only a handful of external components will be needed to construct the circuit from now on.
Once I have that working, I can then hopefully change the code to introduce failsafe features to release the parachute after a certain time period, in case the circuit fails to detect the rotation of the rocket. However I have never used PIC chips before both on the electronic and the programming side so it will be an intresting journey. I will report my findings as I go.