Curiosity: Basic Stamp's lifespan?

Jed

Just out of curiosity, is there a projected lifespan for a basic stamp? Like 100 million executed instructions or something like that before it poops out?

allanlane5

It can be programmed like 100 million times before the EEPROM starts having problems. The eeprom is only limited in "write" cycles -- you can "read" the eeprom with no problems at all. If you programmed it once a minute, every minute, you'd 'wear it out' in about 190.25 years.

You CAN use the keyword "WRITE" to write data to the eeprom directly from the BS2 16C57 chip -- and if you do that once a millisecond the lifetime drops to a week or so before the location you've written to stops accepting data. I THINK it reads as a zero all the time after that -- but I'm not gonna ruin a perfectly good BS2 to find out.

And there is no "max number of instructions executed" life-time -- keep giving it power and it can run for years and years.

Chris Savage

Allan, your write cycle lifetime is a lot higher than the rated number of cycles for the EEPROM on the BASIC Stamp 2. I blieve the datasheet specifies 1,000,000 write cycles.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support

allanlane5

Darn, off by a factor of 100. Alright, you could program it once a minute for 1.9 years.