building basic stamps

taylor999

So these are probably extremely stupid questions, but I'm trying learn how these PIC controllers work...
If I were to build a basic stamp 2 with an PIC16C57 OTP chip and follow the rest of Parallax's schematic, would I be able to program it with PBASIC, or would I need to make some type of assember?

Anyways, I know this is a rather stupid question and it's cheaper to just buy the stamp, but if anybody has any great websites or books on this subject, that would be great!

MovieMaker

I don't think you could program it in PBASIC unless you purchased it and it came from Parallax. This is a very Expensive program that they give you as part of the chip. It doesn't come from a second source. I guess ASM, C+ , and or Perl would be a few languages you could use. But, why bother when you have the Parallax chip with the basic language inside?

Mike Green

There are a variety of good 3rd party compilers for the PIC chips, but they're not free. There are some free compilers, but they're not very good. When you buy a pre-programmed PIC from Parallax with the PBasic interpreter, you're getting a reliable microcontroller Basic interpreter with free development tools and lots of sample code, tutorials, manuals, etc.

taylor999

I figured there were probably many advantages to buying the parllax controller. I was more just wondering how the programming on the chip worked. i.e. if there was a progam permantly stored on the basic chip and the pbasic instructions that you write were then downloaded to the EEPROM or what.

Again, I understand that this is a very basic and stupid question, but I was just curious...

allanlane5

Yes, the Parallax PBasic "run-time" program is programmed into the 16C57. This program knows how to download tokenized PBasic programs from your PC into the on-module eeprom. Then, when 'reset', the 16C57 program knows to read tokens from the eeprom and use those tokens to select run-time routines in the PIC16C57, which then implement the desired behavior.

That's how it works, anyway. And you can't read the 16C57 to get the run-time, the PIC is pretty good about protecting that sort of thing. In fact, the PBasic run-time is about the ONLY thing Parallax hasn't fully documented. But they have to make their money somewhere, after all.

icepuck

Here's something that might help...
http://www.diolan.com/pic/bootloader.html
or google for "pic boot loader" the advantage of this is you have a choice of programing language C, asm or whatever, and down load your program to it like a basic stamp.
-dan