Let there be light!
Huzzah! This week is just victory after victory. Today I wrote five lines of code, hooked up my programmer to the PIC, crossed my fingers, and pressed F6. The LED started blinking! Then it stopped! Then it started again! Then I re-checked the specification, put some more resistors/capacitors on the board, removed the programmer connections, and tried again. It stopped randomly resetting! Yaaaaaay!!! Now I have a stable PIC environment. Adding the USB communication is the last big hurdle to jump for the second revision of project FLIER.
Yes, I have finally chosen a name! Friendly, Lucid, and Intelligent Emotion Reporter. Project FLIER. Nice. Originally the name was "project GLOVE" (Great Local Observer of Varying Emotion), but aspirations have moved beyond the footprint of just a glove so the name had to change. All I have to do now is some yummy programming, and boom will go the dynamite.