BASIC Stamp Discovery Kit/StampWorks Experiment Kit - What will I gain?

near

Hi guys,

I was wondering what I'll be able to gain from either BASIC Stamp Discovery Kit or StampWorks Experiment Kit.

I'm a 2nd year electrical engineering student and I've had some experience programming an FPGA board using Quartus II. My lab projects allowed me to create programs that converted hexadecimals to digits that display on a seven segment, simple calculator, and a simple ping pong machine using a state machine. I'm not an expert in VHDL though. We only used what we had to and the instructors gave us a basic code structure to work with.

So, with the knowledge that I already have, will I gain anything from these kits? If yes, which one? Or maybe suggestions to other kits will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Near

Mike Green

The manuals are freely downloadable. Go to the main Parallax webpage and select the Resources tab, then select Downloads, then Stamps in Class Downloads and you'll see the manuals. Take a look at the exercises and see if any appeal to you. The StampWorks Kit is more complex and does deal with analog to digital and digital to analog conversions as well as PWM (pulse width modulation) for motor control.

You may, as an engineering student, learn more by getting a Propeller Education Kit and going through the tutorials for that. The Propeller is more typical of what is coming "down the pike" for controllers with its multiprogramming and its ability to do device controllers in software like a full speed buffered serial UART and either TV or VGA text or graphics displays. It can also do sigma-delta analog to digital and digital to analog conversions with only a few passive components and can do complex audio synthesis and display of audio input.