Overkill - never a killjoy
While we are overkilling our sensor boards with dedicated brainlets, here’s a suggestion.
Give it a specialized program that will give you more than one bit or one byte per sensor (whatever the number of sensors). Let it spit out actual information about relative position of the bot over the line. Make it a line navigator. It could spit out relative error values. Make it learn the width of the line. Make it go berserk when it detects multiple lines. Make it auto-detect contrast and black-on-white vs white-on-black lines. Make it versatile in accepting/detectng any number of attached QRD’s (within reason).
But most of all: make it a continuous feedback machine. Make it spit out a voltage indicating off-centerness. Have the main brain read that voltage using its own ADC: the ultimate in universal data communications! And as a bonus: no waiting time. Read the error value as often as your super-brain is capable off.
You could even off-load your entire PID control to the brainlet. But now you’re just bragging!
