Congratulations Eric for winning the propeller 2008 design contest
nutson
Posts: 242
I enjoyed looking over·the winning entries to the·2008 propeller design contest, these all prove·the propeller is an exceptional processor and allows building quite complex designs.·Hope to see more of these. The entries also show·that the community using·propellers for embedded control is·large, I see several persons not active on the forums yet.
Nutson·
Nutson·
Comments
Bob
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Aka: CosmicBob
I particularly like the 6502 project Dennis did. Nicely done all!
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
Chat in real time with other Propellerheads on IRC #propeller @ freenode.net
I like all your project, in particular I appreciate the software block diagram.. immediatelly I understood what it is running where.
How did it ? visio, etc?
Congratulation...
Gianni
P.S. If you autorize it, we could set as mandatory the OpenStomp Block Diagram to describe all spin projects.....
I also like the Prop6502 laptop
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http://www.propgfx.co.uk/forum/·home of the PropGFX Lite
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So, Eric... what to do now with all that fame and fortune?
[noparse]:)[/noparse]
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Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
Chat in real time with other Propellerheads on IRC #propeller @ freenode.net
When I get some time, I hope to use it as justification in learning spin, so that I can try and hash out some effects!
Good fun....and so far the neighbors haven't complained!!
(have to figure out how to program those knobs to go to 11 instead of 10!! )
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<FONT>Steve
What's the best thing to do in a lightning storm? "take a one iron out the bag and hold it straight up above your head, even God cant hit a one iron!"
Lee Travino after the second time being hit by lightning!
REPLYS:
Thanks Bob! I'm always striving to pick up expertise in more disciplines. This project gave me the opportunity to learn 3D design and C#, and to do my first circuit board layout. I've worked with consultants who did 3D design and circuit layout for me in the past, and you end up learning a lot along the way in the process of reviewing other people's work. Sooner or later you find yourself thinking "hey, I bet I could do that myself!". It was time to find out.
It took a huge amount of time to pull off, but even before the project was done I was doing C# design, 3D design, and layout at my "real job", so they turned out to be useful skills.
Thanks! One of the things I learned early in my career was the importance of finding a clear graphical way to express a design. A clear diagram helps you (and others) wrap your head around a complex idea (particularly a new one), and can expose weakness, strengths, and missing elements early on. I've spent many an hour banging my head against a wall trying to find the right expression for a diagram. It's always time well spent.
Yes, the diagram is a Visio drawing (good eye!). I'd be happy to share it and anyone is welcome to reuse it. I'll attach it to this post later today (it's not on this computer, so I'll have to attach it later).
HAHA! Well, two things. With the fame I'm hoping to get some more units out there. The larger the development community, the more interesting ideas we'll get bouncing around. I'm a little surprised nobody has done anything with the expansion port yet; there are a lot of possibilities there for weird and interesting controllers. I'll probably put a reference design together soon just to help fuel exploration down that path. I have a simple expansion port device I use for testing the port, so I'll start with that and polish it up for release.
With the fortune, I've acquired a MacBook Pro! It's just a gorgeous piece of engineering and I'm very inspired by it. I've started to explore the possibility of doing a cross-platform (Win/Linux/OsX) version of OpenStomp Workbench, so the Mac is giving me a platform to do that. Now that BradC's cross-platform version of the Propeller Tool is out there (http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=755835) he's opened the doors for OpenStomp on Mac/Linux. The project is still in the exploration stage, and I haven't identified a suitable tool chain yet. At the moment I'm exploring the possibility of using Java.
CONGRATULATIONS:
Congratulations to everyone who participated in the contest! I was particularly excited by the school project & youth entries.
Adam you rock! You remind me so much of me and my buddy Joe when we were your age. Never give up! Never say die! I think you're going to end up having an awesome ride; this is a neat time to grow up as an engineer. You have access to so many resources which used to be very hard to gain access to. Enjoy it; I can see that you're very clever and you're going to go far.
Tom! I love the puppet! He looks so creepy when he squints at me! Very cool project!
Deep Note team, way to go! You guys are getting so much great experience by building something real that has to perform in a real environment with noise and light pollution and what not. Nice job on your web site too. Very clean design all around.
OPENSTOMP BACKSTORY:
I first discovered the Propeller when I heard about Andre's Hydra. I got hold of one immediately and just fell in love with it. The more I dove into the guts, the clearer it was that Chip had done a masterful job of making something really new and cool, and Andre had done a fabulous job into creating a useful design around it. Frankly, I was jealous of the Hydra! I felt like, "I should have done that!". But the difference between "I could have" and "I did" is a whole lot of hours with your fingers at the keyboard [noparse];)[/noparse]
At the time I was finishing up a previous job (which was in the "turn the crank" stage) and waiting for funding on a new one. I was looking for a project to work on for fun, and one night during a long drive the stars just aligned. The Coyote-1 popped into my head as the convergence of many things I was interested in, many technologies I knew, and others I wanted to learn. On top of that, I was eager to make a device from start to finish, just to be able to point to something at the end of the day and say "That's all mine".
It turned out to be a super long haul. The hardware, the firmware, the mechanical design, and the Windows App were all sub-projects in themselves which all had their individual story arcs and their frustrating end games. When you're working for someone else crunching through the roadblocks you run up against is a bit easier, because you're getting paid to sit in a chair and work through those issues every day. When you're on your own it takes a lot of focus to stay up past midnight and grind through an issue that has you stuck when you could be playing Team Fortress 2 [noparse];)[/noparse]. At some point I realized that I was most productive when I was listening to the audiobook version of "iWoz" (Steve Wozniak's autobiography) regularly, so I started listening to it almost religiously. I would get my fix every morning, and when it was over I'd start it again from the beginning. Steve was my personal cheerleader through the rough spots.
PREVIOUS PROJECTS:
Here's a bunch of other stuff I've worked on for fun:
HDMF
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=652719
A system which allows compact MIDI data to be stored on the propeller in low or high EEPROM and used to drive rich polyphonic sound output.
DODGEY KONG
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=652832
Steve Waddicor's amazing Donkey Kong port for the Propeller. He wrote the game and I wrote the sound (using HDMF).
DEFENDER
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=685888
Another Steve Waddicor project. I did sound again, but this time instead of music it was all algorithmic sound effects. It was a really cool project because there's not enough room in the propeller to just record .wav samples from the arcade machine and play them back. I ended up taking samples of each sound effect, analyzing their waveforms graphically, and figuring out algorithmic ways to reproduce them all in a single cog (which took a lot of cramming near the end). This was probably some of the tightest code (from a ROM footprint standpoint) that I've ever written. Steve's been busy on other projects and hasn't polished the game to a finished state, but it is playable and the sound effects are a lot of fun. This is actually one of the things that distracted me during the OpenStomp design [noparse];)[/noparse] It was just too much find to pass up, so I had to take a break to partner up with Steve on it.
SPACEWAR
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=647476
A port of the classic game. Uses HDMF for background music.
SCCuM
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=654555
A project which basically gives #DEFINE functionality to SPIN. It works very well, and is very handy, but apparently never caught on [noparse]:([/noparse] I still wish Parallax would just add #DEFINES to the Propeller tool.
PASd
www.insonix.ch/propeller/prop_pasd.html
Andy Schenk's awesome Propeller debugger. I wrote the english translation of the manual for him. I wanted it to be out there (and in English) so Coyote-1 users could make use of it. It helped me through a number of tricky spots when I was coding the OS.
MACE SMASH
www.experimentalgameplay.com/game.php?g=339
A game I wrote for Windows so I could learn OpenGL. I still think it's fun [noparse];)[/noparse]
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The World's First Open Source Guitar Pedal:··http://www.OpenStomp.com