Obsolete? Never!!!!
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
Frankly, I find the new 'obsolete products' caption a bit offensive - retired would be better. E.O.L is a trade term, but seems a bit drastic as well.
As I understood, Microchip somewhat bullied the SXes into retirement due to their parallel evolution with the PICs. And they now maintain pin out duplicates (which only clock to about 20Mhz) in their PIC line with near duplicate architecture. It is a bit hard to accept that the SXes are 'obsolete', when a lesser copy is remains in mainstream production. In fact, they have added a nice stable 4mhz internal clock that supposedly could be used for asynchronous serial I/O. One no longer has to bother with a 4mhz xtal.
I really appreciate all the effort and knowledge that has gone into making the SXes special. Andre LeMoth provided video games on it, Guenther not only 'wrote the book', but delivered software that made it possible to see what an SX is doing internally with your code, Parallax came up with the SX-Key (which Microchip can never do on a PIC). PJV provided a very interesting, compact RTOS. Bean has shown great creativity in making projects work.
Parallax has apparently set aside enough for many years to keep producing BasicStamps that can out-clock other 8bit RISC devices for a long, long time.
And Guenther, I don't think I would have dared to learn assembly language without your resources.
Admittedly I am a bit of a slow learner and I've made a lot of stupid blunders. But there has been hundreds of hours of pleasure gained in puzzling over the SXes.
I do have to admit that the Propeller does run circles around the SXes, but there are many times that the SXes are still right sized and fun. There is still a lot of genuine 'educational value' here and I suspect that won't change.
As I understood, Microchip somewhat bullied the SXes into retirement due to their parallel evolution with the PICs. And they now maintain pin out duplicates (which only clock to about 20Mhz) in their PIC line with near duplicate architecture. It is a bit hard to accept that the SXes are 'obsolete', when a lesser copy is remains in mainstream production. In fact, they have added a nice stable 4mhz internal clock that supposedly could be used for asynchronous serial I/O. One no longer has to bother with a 4mhz xtal.
I really appreciate all the effort and knowledge that has gone into making the SXes special. Andre LeMoth provided video games on it, Guenther not only 'wrote the book', but delivered software that made it possible to see what an SX is doing internally with your code, Parallax came up with the SX-Key (which Microchip can never do on a PIC). PJV provided a very interesting, compact RTOS. Bean has shown great creativity in making projects work.
Parallax has apparently set aside enough for many years to keep producing BasicStamps that can out-clock other 8bit RISC devices for a long, long time.
And Guenther, I don't think I would have dared to learn assembly language without your resources.
Admittedly I am a bit of a slow learner and I've made a lot of stupid blunders. But there has been hundreds of hours of pleasure gained in puzzling over the SXes.
I do have to admit that the Propeller does run circles around the SXes, but there are many times that the SXes are still right sized and fun. There is still a lot of genuine 'educational value' here and I suspect that won't change.
Comments
The SX has on chip debugging, so I'm not sure what advantage you're referring to there. Have you never used the SX-Key for anything other than programming the chip? If so, then hit CTRL-D in the IDE, and welcome to the party.
Thanks,
PeterM
Additionally, staying with a few 'bare bones' chips that require everything done in software (through virtual peripherals) rather than jumping to another chip with extra hardware really helps one to begin to understand how to take complete advantage of assembly language, including management of interrupts and state machines.
Microchip and PICs have always seemed to have deep pockets and dominated the marketplace with cheaper chips and a wide range of choices. They are good product and have some free software support, but Basic and C are usually best bought for them.
All that still doesn't make them better for learning. In fact, I suspect that they try to make the user more dependent on their expert advice and range of selection than to try to show how to get more out of a simpler micro-controller.
And Microchip never had anything like the helpful people in this forum that have been so willing to answer questions for confused beginners over and over again. I hate to think that moving on to just the Propeller will loose some of that esprit d' corps.
I admit I am a bit stubborn about this. Yes, Mircochip has support and a popular following. In fact, there may come a day when my SX-Key falls apart that I will pursue PICs. I do follow PIClists (and SXlists as well for code questions).
In my off-handed own way, I am just saying that the SX was and still is a good learning platform. And, that the people at Parallax have been quite wonderful.