Project 1 - Joystick Controlled Servos

If your anything like me, you'll understand the difficulty in completing projects.  I want to do so much, nothing gets done.  I call it Technological Attention Deficit Disorder (TADD).  I have been playing around with electronics for over 4 years now, and I have little to show for it.  (apart from hundreds of dollars worth in parts).

So to rid myself of TADD, I decided to complete my first project.  I have forced myself to start and finish one project before moving on to another.  This first project, I have cleverly named Project 1, consists of controlling two RC servos with a joystick.

As you can see from below (or not), I have a PIC16F877A from Microchip, the big black thing in the center.  Connected to that, there are two potentiometers (POT) (the poor man's joystick) on the far left.  Then there are connections for the two RC servos, on the lower left.  Finally, there are lots of other connections to support the PIC's needs; crystal for timing, power, ground, and the black wires which connect my programmer.

I use the PICKit 2 from Microchip which has three interfaces directly to the PIC and another two for power. This is a great programmer in my opinion (but I am only a novice at programming, so what do I know...).

Now I hope to have some video of the above breadboard assembly in action, but for now, you'll have to bear with my description.  You know when you do something for the first time... and everything goes just as you hoped?  This was not one of those times, it sort of worked.  I guess you could say it was a success, I turned the POT, and the servo rotated....

There was a lot of noise coming from..... somewhere, and the servos were not at all smooth.  I did try to move a few things around, but nothing seemed to help.  I had a look on-line and noticed that when designing printed wiring boards (PWBs) a ground plane is typically added to reduce/eliminate noise.

I'm not saying this was the right thing to do, but I jumped into designing the schematic and then layed out a board (for the first time).  So here they are, on order from BatchPCB.  All the parts will be ordered from SparkFun.