Updated BS2 OEM Bill of Materials

bfav

Found a "Bill of Materials" in the downloads for the BS2 OEM:

http://www.parallax.com/Store/Microcontrollers/BASICStampOEM/tabid/135/CategoryID/10/List/0/SortField/0/Level/a/ProductID/21/Default.aspx

Which I thought was pretty helpful...· Includes P/N for Digikey, Jameco, and Mouser.· Dated Jan 2004.· I noticed that many of the P/N on the sites are outdated.· Is there a more recent BoM for the BS2 OEM?

Thanks,

Brian

allanlane5

Probably not -- looks pretty thorough.

Note you MUST (repeat MUST) purchase the PIC chip in that picture from Parallax. That is no mere off-the-shelf 16C57 PIC chip. That's a custom programmed (by Parallax) BS2 "OEM" Interpreter PIC chip (built on an off-the-shelf 16C57 PIC chip). That's why it costs $11, instead of $2, because it has proprietary Parallax firmware programmed into it. And only the Parallax programmed "Interpreter Chip" will run the assembly as a BS2. With an off-the-shelf 16C57 chip, you'll have assembled a $20 package that doesn't do anything.

Others have fallen into this tempting trap, so that's why I'm being so pedantic about it.

And before you ask, No, you can't "xerox" the code from an "Interpreter PIC chip" and burn your own, the "visible" bit has been cleared. And yes, you COULD re-create the PBasic interpreter in theory, but it would cost way more than it was worth by the time you made it reliable. And NO, Parallax has NOT made the PBasic run-time engine source code available, that's about the ONLY thing they haven't documented in complete detail, they have to make their money off SOMETHING after all.

And I suspect there'd be significant legal action against anybody trying to sell commercially a "BS2 clone" device. There ARE several devices for sale based on the 24-pin wide DIP form-factor of the BS2 (like Parallax's own Javalin module) but all that I know of are slightly or dramatically different than Parallax's PBasic environment.