Dimming while receiving serial

I commented out the hserin line, and put some code in its place to flash a led when a serial interrupt occurs (I fiqured I better get interrupts to work before I try and read the serial buffer)

Adam said:

I commented out the hserin line, and put some code in its place to flash a led when a serial interrupt occurs (I fiqured I better get interrupts to work before I try and read the serial buffer)

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Please post the code you added!.

You've got a 'pause 500' in the interrupt routine - while the interrupt routine is sat waiting for half a second your LED's will be ON or OFF (depending on their state when the interrupt was called) - having the LED ON for half a second is going to make your PWM look like permanently ON.

Your interrupt routine needs to be as short as possible, it certainly shouldn't have any delays in it.

I know that, the point of that is as a test to see if the interrupt works, I know full well that when it does that it will make a mess of the dimming, but the problem is that the dimming is a mess before there is any reason for an interrupt to occur, so why is the interrupt occuring when nothing has been sent?

Do some tests to examine the interrupt behaviour.

Try to find out what interrupt triggers the interrupt routine by testing the flags. normally, this could only be the usart interrupt, because you masked out the others, but there's no way to be sure with this basic compiler adding it's own filth to the code...

Then, if it is the usart interrupt, find out how it gets triggerd and how many times. There could be just 1 spontanious interrupt triggered by the usart beeing configured - if this is the case, a well written interrupt/packet reception routine will automatically ignore the byte.

One thing to try is setting up the usart by yourself by writing the required values to the registers directly and not using predefined basic routines to do so (like DEFINE HSER_BAUD 2400).