History of the UAV
November 10th, 2006 by 
lorne
I should have kept a blog from the beginning, because it’s almost impossible now for me to relate (or even remember) everything that’s happened.
I started out with a Basic Atom (a rip-off of the famous Basic Stamp), which was a great decision. It worked right out of the box, and provided a good introduction to the world of microcontrollers. It wasn’t long though before I had out-grown it. There were no methods for floating-point math, so SIN and COS were pretty-well out of the question. The syntax of BASIC was also starting to drive me mad.
With my new-found knowledge of microcontrollers, I started assembling my own version of the Basic Atom. I sampled some PICs from Microchip, ordered some parts from Digi-Key, and put them together on a breadboard. To my utter astonishment, it worked! I had a blinking LED! (the “Hello World” of hardware)
For a while I flirted with Mikroelektronika’s C compiler / IDE. That was probably the biggest mistake I’ve made on this project. The Mikroelektronika compiler is crap. Compile the same code multiple times, and you’ll get different hex sizes and checksums (some of which run correctly - most of which don’t). After spending weeks chasing compiler ghosts, and fruitlessly tinkering with broken libraries, I finally gave up and switched to Microchip’s MPLAB. I should have known that the only tools to use would be the “official” ones. I’ve never found a broken library or had unexplainable behavior since.
