Today, I decided to scrounge around my parts bin for components to get the ball rolling. I found an old board I made featuring the pic16lf1459 MCU by picmicro, a battery holder, and after a quick trip to the local electronics shop, a couple sparkfun LSM303C. The final components and layout will be on a dedicated board eventually, however for now, this will let me begin development of the underlying code.

I still need to track down a bluetooth module to do the interface, and will be picking up a couple of those soon.

The LSM303C was a great find as it also has a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis magnetometer in the same small package. The plan is to have this interfaced to the SPI bus and then using the USB features that the pic16lf1459 sports, send the data to a standard terminal on the PC.

Link for the LSM303C sparkfun breakout board: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13303

Link for the pic16lf1459 MCU: http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/PIC16F1459

The schematic for the above is very simple with some basic supporting circuitry for the USB functionality. Programming for this is to be done with an ICD3, however you could also use a pickit 3 programmer with no problem. Code is to be written using the XC8 compiler suite.

You can find the IDE and XC8 compilers on microchips website here: http://www.microchip.com/mplab/mplab-x-ide

and

http://www.microchip.com/mplab/compilers