I am so buying one of these! At $79 that is a deal compared to the PDB that can't do half of the stuff this little baby can do...Also, i want to say thank you for standing your ground and manufacturing this in the great USA. You might not see it like this but you guys ARE helping your fellow countrymen. God bless America and God bless Parallax!!!
Congratulations Andre & Parallax. Hope you sell heaps and like I said to Bill, I do hope it brings lots of new faces to the Prop, not just those that lurk here already.
Ken, It is not often companies expose these cost details. Those of us in the industry fully understand these costs. Even at $79 it is keenly priced and anything lower is a bonus.
Right -- I think that reality is $59 min and $69 max initially. Once we get an average sales volume then we can consider going lower if we (Parallax) knows they can sell thru a larger build each cycle. We want this to be a medium to high volume product. You get much more than a single AVR chip like an Arduino, but still we don't want it to be so expensive you can't buy 2 or 3 to build a nice application.
That said, I have been playing with the final prototypes for a couple months and its very cool having the SRAM, the A/D, etc. all in this really small credit card size, so I am very happy with it. Finishing off the add on daughter board now and sending that to prototyping.
@ the question about pre-orders. I think once we have the cost locked down and can decide on the price they will start. Parallax might even using a lower price point for the initial pre-orders like the $59 then once it starts shipping go to $69, that's a way to say thanks for pre-ordering. We will see
The USB-powered aspect will be great for those who travel with Propellers - program it easily on an airplane, train, or wherever you're going without providing external power supplies. The very small size (credit card) really helps on the portability side of things. At last check it fit within an Altoids tin.
Yeah!
Love that. I've been roaming around with props for a while, and it's not too bad, if one makes a nice case, or bag, with batteries and such. This bugger will fit into a hard case, with USB video capture, eliminating the battery, and the bulk!
Dang! Gonna save more pennies 'cause I want a Propcade too!
Thanks guys. I second the "made in USA" comments above. Every little bit counts, and it's the principle of the thing, if nothing else. Love it!
That thing looks pretty cool. I really like the fact that it does power over USB. I cary around my prop dongle for on the road programming, but this has way more features. I think I will be getting one...if it comes with little rubber feet What is the chip between the prop and the ftdi chip?
If you do something like a C4, please make it a multiprop design so that there is more of a multiprop programming base out there. It also eliminates the need for a mux.
I know this is off topic, but seing the costs involved, it reminded me of the port b prop. How is that comming?
The demos are all very simple -- since I already did the HYDRA, there isn't much more to impress people with from a graphics and programming standpoint on the Prop. Thus, these demos are short and sweet and boring. Designed to show how to use peripheral X.
The IO works like this, P0-P7 is completely free, so that goes on the bottom left header on the right of the board. Then to the right of that is the SPI bus, I2C bus, power. Above on the left is P16-P23 which is muxed with the VGA, but a control IO is used to enable/disable the mux (no switch like in the HYDRA), so that port is completely disconnected from the VGA circuitry if you wish. This was one of the reasons I designed this with the SPI components, we wanted the smallest impact on the IO space. NExt, to the right, that header at top is tx, rx, the PS/2 port IOs, so they can be re-used, power, reset, kind of thing.
And finally "what is this really for" -- the idea of this is an "application" board. That means, its not for development/learning in that it only contains a single prop and regulation. This board is designed for high end projects and control where you need built in A/D, larger memory for recording, SRAMS maybe for buffers that hold data, code, whatever etc. So, the idea here is a "credit card computer" that has everything you need to build something rather complex without adding FLASH, SD, SRAM, A/D, etc. its all on the card. A lot of customers have been wanting something like this, so here it is.
As far as the multiprop design, I initially wanted to do a HYDRA 2 with 4 props 3 years ago, but the problem is that I would have to write a real toy OS or something that helps normal users utilize the multiprops better. My initial idea 3 years ago was do a 4 Prop HYDRA 2 with 12 more slots for little Prop Blades that have just a Prop on them, memory, and you could buy them separately. But, with the P2 in development makes it hard to invest to do it. I think the consensus was that if you couldn't just code in spin/ASM like normal and fire off another Prop transparently on another processor, it would just be too hard for people to program. I know there are a number of multiprop products out there, but I am not sure how well they are selling. I think customers have their hands full with the concept on a single prop and multicore, rather than multicore and multiprocessing. So, I personally, think cool, that's great, but we need a good OS kernel to make this easy for users and I would have to write it if I did the project and that's going to cost someone some money. I think a good "start" to multiprop designs (and maybe someone has done this), is to start a core hardware design that uses a hub of sorts, a memory management/shared communication scheme, and is very simple to build, make this open source, write some drivers, etc. and a reference design, then if everything that makes a multiprop design follows this then after a while people will use the multiprop bus design, just like IDE, S100 etc.
This is a very nice little board, will have to keep track of this. Now, the question that I do have is, is this the board that Propeller Micro C (PMC) will be featured with? Back many months ago, there was a long thread about the introduction of PMC. At that time Ken mentioned that there would also be a board that would accompany the PMC, so, is there another board in the works?
This is an interesting effort with lots of features. Nice graphics on the PCB.
Ken's costs are honest and reasonable for the USA. I run a DoD research program and can tell you his costs are really cheap in comparison. It's hard to develop a concept and take it to manufacturing at this scale; and risky too!
As far as the multiprop design, I initially wanted to do a HYDRA 2 with 4 props 3 years ago, but the problem is that I would have to write a real toy OS or something that helps normal users utilize the multiprops better. My initial idea 3 years ago was do a 4 Prop HYDRA 2 with 12 more slots for little Prop Blades that have just a Prop on them, memory, and you could buy them separately.
That sounds very cool! Any chance you'll reconsider? :-)
Or, how about a daughter card for the C3 that has four more Propeller chips on it with some flexible ways of interconnecting them?
Not unless Parallax wants a massively parallel system. But, if I did one now, I would want an ARM7 or 9, PIC32, or AVR32 as the ring leader, a centralized RAM maybe with 4-16MB of static RAM, ethernet, dedicated video controller and LCD, a hub system to access the main ram along with local memories and a similar system, so you have a fractal bus layered with 4, 16, 64, so groups of 1, 4, 16, or the whole lot can work on a problem in parallel and get more bandwidth out of the shared buses, maybe suck up 12 IOs per Prop, then support a Blade system with maybe 64 Props on cards max. That would be a really nice experimental system to play with multicore and multiprocessor. The initial system would be low cost since you don't have to populate it, and then as you can, you buy $20 blades to add another prop. But, how many people need that? Only schools really, robot experimentation, etc. Average users not really.
But, with this design you can code with a standard processor in C/C++ write a large scale application, run an OS, and on each prop have a little kernel that allows you to run all your threads. Basically, it would emulate a Cell processor which has a PPC master with the 7/8 SPEs, in this case we would have a standard processor for the master, then the props would be like the SPEs in the cell. And with 64 of them, it wouldn't be too shabby
But, on the C3, you could definitely add blades right now, on the Prop C3 prototype board, what you could do is put 8 headers and then make a bunch of prop cards that sit vertical then over the buses from the C3 interface to them with some protocol. Maybe once this gets selling, I will design a open source design and let people build it if they want --
No, they aren't -- the idea here was how do you generate chip selects from the least amount of signals? 2 lines to select any number of SPI devices? The solution is to use one line for reset, and one for clock - use these to clock a 4-bit counter, then take the 4-bit output and send it to an active low decoder. So there is a 161 counter that feeds a 138 decoder to create this logic. So, with just 2 lines, we can select a lot of SPI devices and not waste IO lines to select spi devices separately. They all share the same bus (mosi, miso, clk), thus only one can be used at a time anyway, so this is the optimal configuration of hardware resources.
Even though it is not intended for a development platform, it would be cool if you guys included a couple of "demos" just to show off the device and its features...Maybe a program that will just test all the various hardware and send back the results over the serial terminal. Like it would do a dummy write on the SRAM, flash and SD and then read back those locations to see if it works....Just a thought....Any release date yet? Even a general time frame?
Cole,
Spring for a Propeller Protoboard. Look at the 1-Pin keyboard and display drivers in the Propeller Object Exchange and add a couple of resistors, a PS/2 socket, and an RCA socket to your Protoboard on two I/O pins (like 26 and 27). Download BST and PropBasic and start learning. That's $30 in parts that you can use for other things later.
No, they aren't -- the idea here was how do you generate chip selects from the least amount of signals? 2 lines to select any number of SPI devices? The solution is to use one line for reset, and one for clock - use these to clock a 4-bit counter, then take the 4-bit output and send it to an active low decoder. So there is a 161 counter that feeds a 138 decoder to create this logic. So, with just 2 lines, we can select a lot of SPI devices and not waste IO lines to select spi devices separately. They all share the same bus (mosi, miso, clk), thus only one can be used at a time anyway, so this is the optimal configuration of hardware resources.
Andre'
Andre', I tried this approach and couldn't figure out how to keep the address decode logic from changing or resetting when I went to access the selected SPI address without needing 2 control pins. I'd love to know how you wired this (and coded it too!). This simple concept could be used to expand to other devices as well. My goal at the time was to design a Prop extender board with minimal pin usage.
Bill, you are so correct. Hopefully our customers will always be so understanding. Building products with components sourced from Digi-Key, Mouser, Future and whoever else has a high cost (and the very real benefit of consistency on subsequent builds). And nothing compares to California labor for manufacturing. Customers don't complain, but sometimes they don't buy because of costs. This product will have a high retail and for good reason. Since the product is open-sourced it might even be helpful for others on this forum to know about the real costs:
Design/engineering: $ 20,000
Bill of materials setup 5,000
Documentation costs 10,000
Prototype costs 3,000
P&P programming/setup 2,000
======
Total 40,000 and no product has even shipped
Per unit BOM costs: 30
Manufacturing labor/kitting 10
======
Unit cost 40
I didn't mention the initial inventory costs.
Retail price may be $79, but the average selling price could be more about $55 given distributor discounts.
...[Other text was removed to conserve space]...
At least from my perspective . . .
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
Ken; I had never thought of it like that. I had always though of it as markup. But your explanation really helps me understand how things get priced and setup. I also never considered how many hours a project like this can consume. Thank you very much for the explanation.
I think Ken's break-out of costs is a good dose of reality for us. Many of us can rig up a proof of concept in a weekend using parts we have around the bench. It is easy to extrapolate that to a Parallax product and think that 50k+ in costs to bring to market is absurd. But there is a huge gap between a hobby and a business. I think the lists of issues for a commercial product (albeit high-end) is sobering. And I am not sure if you have even included the post-sale support, a product feature that is invaluable in the case of Parallax.
I take into consideration Made-in-America in my purchases. And even if assembly was out-sourced to the cheapest bidder, Parallax still assumes the expensive responsibility that the manufacturing will meet P'lax standards.
Not many of us would actually take on the responsibility of manufacturing, shipping, support, overhead for employees, etc. If a neo-entrepreneur thinks they can beat the price and quality they can give it a try through GadgetGangster (who already take on 3/4 of the headaches.) I suspect that it will be an experience the inventor/marketer won't repeat.
From my standpoint, BOM and assembly are a small part of the purchase; the Parallax service and reliability are what I am really buying.
(I'm not shilling for P'lax, this is just an economic analysis that is taking into account the non-per-unit costs of a product).
Cole,
You get yourself a soldering iron and some very fine gauge lead-free solder at RadioShack and keep it at home (dorm or whatever). RadioShack even has some battery powered little soldering irons for doing small field repairs that would be adequate for a couple of connections like what I'm suggesting. Basic tools would include a small pair of wire cutters and needle nosed pliers.
Frankly, these tools are so basic that I'd internet mail order some quality tools from someone like Jameco or Mouser and pay a bit more for quality tools.
If you do order a Protoboard, get a strip of female 0.1" headers (this) so you can solder them onto the Protoboard to get easy access to the I/O pins and power with jumper wires. If the strip's too long, you break it or cut it into something shorter.
I've made a soldering surface out of a cardboard sheet covered with aluminum foil (for heat resistance and heat dissipation if a drop of solder lands on it).
Comments
Ken, It is not often companies expose these cost details. Those of us in the industry fully understand these costs. Even at $79 it is keenly priced and anything lower is a bonus.
That said, I have been playing with the final prototypes for a couple months and its very cool having the SRAM, the A/D, etc. all in this really small credit card size, so I am very happy with it. Finishing off the add on daughter board now and sending that to prototyping.
@ the question about pre-orders. I think once we have the cost locked down and can decide on the price they will start. Parallax might even using a lower price point for the initial pre-orders like the $59 then once it starts shipping go to $69, that's a way to say thanks for pre-ordering. We will see
Andre'
Yeah!
Love that. I've been roaming around with props for a while, and it's not too bad, if one makes a nice case, or bag, with batteries and such. This bugger will fit into a hard case, with USB video capture, eliminating the battery, and the bulk!
Dang! Gonna save more pennies 'cause I want a Propcade too!
Thanks guys. I second the "made in USA" comments above. Every little bit counts, and it's the principle of the thing, if nothing else. Love it!
Are all the pin exporterd to the header? I can see 0 to 7, and after 16. So is the 2nd raw for the rest?
Also, are all the pin usable? Like, if you don't this or that, can you keep ths dedicate pins for something else?
JM
If you do something like a C4, please make it a multiprop design so that there is more of a multiprop programming base out there. It also eliminates the need for a mux.
I know this is off topic, but seing the costs involved, it reminded me of the port b prop. How is that comming?
Thanks,
Doug
AndreL, any possibility for an add-on 2nd prop via the headers?
20-30 demos?
YouTube.... NOW !!!
The demos are all very simple -- since I already did the HYDRA, there isn't much more to impress people with from a graphics and programming standpoint on the Prop. Thus, these demos are short and sweet and boring. Designed to show how to use peripheral X.
The IO works like this, P0-P7 is completely free, so that goes on the bottom left header on the right of the board. Then to the right of that is the SPI bus, I2C bus, power. Above on the left is P16-P23 which is muxed with the VGA, but a control IO is used to enable/disable the mux (no switch like in the HYDRA), so that port is completely disconnected from the VGA circuitry if you wish. This was one of the reasons I designed this with the SPI components, we wanted the smallest impact on the IO space. NExt, to the right, that header at top is tx, rx, the PS/2 port IOs, so they can be re-used, power, reset, kind of thing.
And finally "what is this really for" -- the idea of this is an "application" board. That means, its not for development/learning in that it only contains a single prop and regulation. This board is designed for high end projects and control where you need built in A/D, larger memory for recording, SRAMS maybe for buffers that hold data, code, whatever etc. So, the idea here is a "credit card computer" that has everything you need to build something rather complex without adding FLASH, SD, SRAM, A/D, etc. its all on the card. A lot of customers have been wanting something like this, so here it is.
As far as the multiprop design, I initially wanted to do a HYDRA 2 with 4 props 3 years ago, but the problem is that I would have to write a real toy OS or something that helps normal users utilize the multiprops better. My initial idea 3 years ago was do a 4 Prop HYDRA 2 with 12 more slots for little Prop Blades that have just a Prop on them, memory, and you could buy them separately. But, with the P2 in development makes it hard to invest to do it. I think the consensus was that if you couldn't just code in spin/ASM like normal and fire off another Prop transparently on another processor, it would just be too hard for people to program. I know there are a number of multiprop products out there, but I am not sure how well they are selling. I think customers have their hands full with the concept on a single prop and multicore, rather than multicore and multiprocessing. So, I personally, think cool, that's great, but we need a good OS kernel to make this easy for users and I would have to write it if I did the project and that's going to cost someone some money. I think a good "start" to multiprop designs (and maybe someone has done this), is to start a core hardware design that uses a hub of sorts, a memory management/shared communication scheme, and is very simple to build, make this open source, write some drivers, etc. and a reference design, then if everything that makes a multiprop design follows this then after a while people will use the multiprop bus design, just like IDE, S100 etc.
Andre'
I see both the Propcade and C3 in my Christmas list this year!
Excellent work by all parties involved!
OBC
Ray
Ken's costs are honest and reasonable for the USA. I run a DoD research program and can tell you his costs are really cheap in comparison. It's hard to develop a concept and take it to manufacturing at this scale; and risky too!
Or, how about a daughter card for the C3 that has four more Propeller chips on it with some flexible ways of interconnecting them?
But, with this design you can code with a standard processor in C/C++ write a large scale application, run an OS, and on each prop have a little kernel that allows you to run all your threads. Basically, it would emulate a Cell processor which has a PPC master with the 7/8 SPEs, in this case we would have a standard processor for the master, then the props would be like the SPEs in the cell. And with 64 of them, it wouldn't be too shabby
But, on the C3, you could definitely add blades right now, on the Prop C3 prototype board, what you could do is put 8 headers and then make a bunch of prop cards that sit vertical then over the buses from the C3 interface to them with some protocol. Maybe once this gets selling, I will design a open source design and let people build it if they want --
Andre'
Are the two chips under the "SPI MUX" column the same? 74hc138s?
No, they aren't -- the idea here was how do you generate chip selects from the least amount of signals? 2 lines to select any number of SPI devices? The solution is to use one line for reset, and one for clock - use these to clock a 4-bit counter, then take the 4-bit output and send it to an active low decoder. So there is a 161 counter that feeds a 138 decoder to create this logic. So, with just 2 lines, we can select a lot of SPI devices and not waste IO lines to select spi devices separately. They all share the same bus (mosi, miso, clk), thus only one can be used at a time anyway, so this is the optimal configuration of hardware resources.
Andre'
Demos? ... Read this thread.
I have written 20-30 demos that do just that and a manual. Read previous posts.
Andre'
Spring for a Propeller Protoboard. Look at the 1-Pin keyboard and display drivers in the Propeller Object Exchange and add a couple of resistors, a PS/2 socket, and an RCA socket to your Protoboard on two I/O pins (like 26 and 27). Download BST and PropBasic and start learning. That's $30 in parts that you can use for other things later.
Andre', I tried this approach and couldn't figure out how to keep the address decode logic from changing or resetting when I went to access the selected SPI address without needing 2 control pins. I'd love to know how you wired this (and coded it too!). This simple concept could be used to expand to other devices as well. My goal at the time was to design a Prop extender board with minimal pin usage.
KK
Ken; I had never thought of it like that. I had always though of it as markup. But your explanation really helps me understand how things get priced and setup. I also never considered how many hours a project like this can consume. Thank you very much for the explanation.
KK / Fred
I take into consideration Made-in-America in my purchases. And even if assembly was out-sourced to the cheapest bidder, Parallax still assumes the expensive responsibility that the manufacturing will meet P'lax standards.
Not many of us would actually take on the responsibility of manufacturing, shipping, support, overhead for employees, etc. If a neo-entrepreneur thinks they can beat the price and quality they can give it a try through GadgetGangster (who already take on 3/4 of the headaches.) I suspect that it will be an experience the inventor/marketer won't repeat.
From my standpoint, BOM and assembly are a small part of the purchase; the Parallax service and reliability are what I am really buying.
(I'm not shilling for P'lax, this is just an economic analysis that is taking into account the non-per-unit costs of a product).
You get yourself a soldering iron and some very fine gauge lead-free solder at RadioShack and keep it at home (dorm or whatever). RadioShack even has some battery powered little soldering irons for doing small field repairs that would be adequate for a couple of connections like what I'm suggesting. Basic tools would include a small pair of wire cutters and needle nosed pliers.
Frankly, these tools are so basic that I'd internet mail order some quality tools from someone like Jameco or Mouser and pay a bit more for quality tools.
If you do order a Protoboard, get a strip of female 0.1" headers (this) so you can solder them onto the Protoboard to get easy access to the I/O pins and power with jumper wires. If the strip's too long, you break it or cut it into something shorter.
I've made a soldering surface out of a cardboard sheet covered with aluminum foil (for heat resistance and heat dissipation if a drop of solder lands on it).