Compatibility of Sensors with Basic Stamp

roberters

Hi!

I am researching sensors for the Boe Bot I recently bought for a school project, and I am having trouble telling which sensors are compatible with Basic Stamp.· I have found a number of sensors from Allen-Bradley and Robotshop, and both companies said that pretty much all of their sensors are compatible.· Is that true?· How can I tell?

Thanks for your help!

Mike Green

It depends ... Sometimes one company's truth is what they want you to believe. You have to download the datasheets for the device and look at them.

The Stamp has I/O pins that work with +5V logic levels. Generally, any sensor that has an on-off signal using 5V logic should work, but there are different "protocols" sometimes. Some sensors use I2C (from Philips ... now NXP). That requires some subroutines to implement and there are articles in the Nuts and Volts columns from Parallax that show you how to do that. Some sensors use SPI. There are some examples of that also in the Nuts and Volts series and other places. Some sensors use serial I/O. Some sensors have analog outputs and you need an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) like the ADC0831 which Parallax sells and supports.