I love the Propeller
SamMishal
Posts: 468
Hi All,
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Every once in a while something comes along that makes you ENJOY LIFE.
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The Propeller chip has rejuvenated my love for electronics.
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It is amazing to me that the whole world is not hailing this fantastic chip and equally
its development environment and the support people behind it.
·
You guys should win a Nobel Prize for the most innovative and enjoyable invention since
the LASER.
·
·
I am properly preaching to the choir here...............BUT ...............I have to say
this:
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CONGRATULATIONS PARALLAX.............I always knew you are a great lot of Evil Geneuses..........
But as GREAT as the BS2 (1) was in its days I think you have now managed to revolutionize the
microcontroller industry.
·
I received the Propeller Education Kit on Wednesday afternoon. In less than 15 hours of reading
and experimenting I have managed to write my own program (albeit simple) from scratch without
looking at any example code or even referring to the help system.
·
The program launches two instances of the same object which then launch their own
methods in a cog each.
·
So in less than 15 hours of learning I managed to get a Multiprocessor Multitasking
system up and running.·
·
This is a testament to the beauty and ease of the Spin language and the Propeller Chip.
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I am seeing amazing things for the Propeller and Spin in the future.............It is a
wonderful phenomenon
·
·
Thank you Parallax for the Spin Language and For the Propeller Chip.....you have
given us bored old “seen-it-all-done-it-all” cynics a reason for wanting to learn again.
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I love it........I am looking forward to doing something substantial with it soon.
·
Congratulations and thanks for the most fun 3 days I had·for·a long time…yes it is even
Better than……}:-)
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·
Samuel
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Post Edited (SamMishal) : 5/30/2009 9:56:04 PM GMT
·
Every once in a while something comes along that makes you ENJOY LIFE.
·
The Propeller chip has rejuvenated my love for electronics.
·
It is amazing to me that the whole world is not hailing this fantastic chip and equally
its development environment and the support people behind it.
·
You guys should win a Nobel Prize for the most innovative and enjoyable invention since
the LASER.
·
·
I am properly preaching to the choir here...............BUT ...............I have to say
this:
·
CONGRATULATIONS PARALLAX.............I always knew you are a great lot of Evil Geneuses..........
But as GREAT as the BS2 (1) was in its days I think you have now managed to revolutionize the
microcontroller industry.
·
I received the Propeller Education Kit on Wednesday afternoon. In less than 15 hours of reading
and experimenting I have managed to write my own program (albeit simple) from scratch without
looking at any example code or even referring to the help system.
·
The program launches two instances of the same object which then launch their own
methods in a cog each.
·
So in less than 15 hours of learning I managed to get a Multiprocessor Multitasking
system up and running.·
·
This is a testament to the beauty and ease of the Spin language and the Propeller Chip.
·
I am seeing amazing things for the Propeller and Spin in the future.............It is a
wonderful phenomenon
·
·
Thank you Parallax for the Spin Language and For the Propeller Chip.....you have
given us bored old “seen-it-all-done-it-all” cynics a reason for wanting to learn again.
·
I love it........I am looking forward to doing something substantial with it soon.
·
Congratulations and thanks for the most fun 3 days I had·for·a long time…yes it is even
Better than……}:-)
·
·
·
Samuel
·
Post Edited (SamMishal) : 5/30/2009 9:56:04 PM GMT
Comments
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Not the fish.
sites.google.com/site/bitwinproject/
Thank you, Chip, Andy, Beau, Ken, Paul, and ALL the wonderful people working behind the scenes at the "magic workshop", Parallax.
Glad to hear another person has been 'grabbed' by the Propeller.
Welcome aboard the Prop forum. Lots more fun to be had, for sure.
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Harley Shanko
I never even think about using a arduino or a pic, the prop is so easy to learn yet extremely powerful.
Very well said.
Adam Wiesler
I have noticed that there are two general reactions to the Prop and what it can do.
The first class is "WTF is it good for? What can you do with only 32K of RAM? Sure it's fast, but I can't see what you would do with it."
The second class is "HOLY #*@%@% THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING."
I look on the 32K thing as a gentle challenge; it wasn't that long ago (or so it seems) that I would have willingly traded rather important parts of my anatomy for a computer with 32K RAM, and the whole world was run by machines of that class. People seemed to find ways to deal with it. With the Prop, your reward for taking that 80's-era challenge is blazing speed, incredible hardware design simplicity, and the ability to replace a whole mess of expensive special-purpose interface and control chips with software.
I heard about the Prop when Hackaday linked to the Ybox2. I looked at the hack and said, wait a minute, this thing in an altoids tin is generating NTSC video? AND running ethernet? Within a week of learning that the Prop existed I sold two of them in the form of PropRPM boards, replacing a $650 VFD display we used to use with a much more powerful combination of the PropRPM and a "headrest" car video display for under $200, and it works better and is easier to troubleshoot.
For that project I had to modify tv_text to output big characters, because it was essentially a small scoreboard display I needed. I set it up to display 4 lines of 20 chars, a pretty standard configuration, but later I realized I didn't have enough room to lay out one display I wanted. So I went back into tv_text and jiggered it to display 4 lines of 27 characters.
And when it gets hit by lightning, as it probably will because it's in the middle of a field behind a coal fired power plant in northern Louisiana, the service guys can just go to the local car audio place to get a new display instead of ordering it from Newark.
I have been programming since about 1975, and the Prop changes everything. If you can't figure out what a processor with 32K is good for, don't be surprised when something in an Altoids tin blows you away.
Could you say they got caught in the intake? (isn't intake a term used in jet engines?)
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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com
Samuel
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--Steve
Propalyzer: Propeller PC Logic Analyzer
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=788230
-Phil
What do you mean by "segmented" though. I am not that familiar with other microcontrollers except the HC11, but that was more than a decade ago.
-Phil
Propelled by the Propeller.........
Samuel
I like that!!
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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com
I fondly remember going through each demo installed in the library/examples folder of proptool with amazement..and just hunting for the peripherals to plug into the protoboard as fast as possible, I really wasn't expecting to hook-up NTSC Video, VGA, Sound...etc in under 1 hour!! Have to thank the Propeller Cookbook for that.
And on top of that...these forums. Aside from google this is probably my most frequented website.
Rick
The first time I realized how easy the chip is was when I plugged a mouse into a protoboard and inside of about 20 minutes, was using mouse readings in a program. When I think of what I had to go through in the early 90s to read mouse positions and clicks in a C program, I was very happy with what Parallax has given us.
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--Jeff Martin
· Sr. Software Engineer
· Parallax, Inc.
To me the thing that made me scream with joy is when I had two cogs running in parallel BUT....one of them influenced the other
by writing data in a memory address that the other·cog acted upon to change its behavior...............
This parallel processing with ability to share memory without having to fiddle with semaphores and critical sections
(I know you may have to do this eventually) is just a dream come true.
The propeller can make things that were sooooo hard·or·even impossible to achieve a breeze to do..........what a treasure.
I am so glad to have had the time to learn it.....the best 4 days ever.
Sam
I'm still learning!!
Hooking up three resistors and seeing the Graphics demo for the first time was the OMG moment for me with the Propeller. The "This changes everything!" moment happened the next day when I realized that I could actually design my own microcomputer based on the Propeller, and that the technology was completely within my grasp.
I agree, the folks at Parallax deserve the Nobel prize for their work. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
OBC
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New to the Propeller?
Visit the: The Propeller Pages @ Warranty Void.
I wanted to do and I learnt enough to do it.
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On the RobotBASIC forum (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RobotBasic/) I had a while ago advised
people that to avoid ratcheting and erratic behavior of their robots they should use the parallel processing
abilities of the Propeller.
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At the time I had only read the specs and some of the forum threads, but I was not really sure how easy
or hard it was going to be for the people I advised to convert their projects from the BS2 or other processors
or if·the propeller·even lives up to what I THOUGHT it is.
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In RobotBASIC we have an inbuilt robot simulator. In addition, we have an automatic serial I/O protocol that
can be used to control (wired or wireless) a real robot at the same time you are controlling the simulated robot.
So the very same commands that are used to make the simulated robot do things can be made to control a real
robot with the addition of one line of code. See this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vftgmZQCheA&feature=channel_page
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The protocol above has been tested extensively with the BS2 on a modified BoeBot. Other people have also
used it with·other robots and microcontrollers with great success.
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However, due to the nature of the BS2 not being able to do serial io while controlling two servos and reading
sensors and so on and so forth, the movements of the robot end up being a little ratchety and erratic since the
motors would stop while serial IO is being performed etc.
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I had suggested the Parallax Multi-Servo controller and that works well mostly. Nevertheless, it would be nice
to have a processor to control the Servos, another processor for the Serial IO and another for reading the sensors.
Each processor would either read its parameters for action from a central memory, or would put its readings into
that same memory.
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This way the commands can be in the process of being received but at the same time the motors are still being
turned, the sensors are still being read. When the commands are received the motor speeds and direction will
change due to a register that has been modified by the processor that read the commands from the serial IO.
Also the serial IO processor can read the status of the sensors from the registers that were written by the
processor that controls reading the sensor.
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This way all the LOGICAL processes that have to normally be achieved in sequence in a BS2 can be all going on
in Parallel and since the shared memory is accessible to all then there is no problem intercommunicating all the
processors which would be another time bottleneck.
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I had in mind to prove that my advice was not misleading. So in the last 4 days I set out to learn Spin and use
the propeller to prove my theory. Well, I did and the propeller is even more than I had hoped.
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I am very much interested in all the PS2 interfacing and VGA and TV etc. stuff and even more so with the
Audio I/O possibilities etc. etc. I have not learnt anything about these abilities and I will need·more time to do so.
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However, the propeller won me over even without any of this stuff. Just the fact that I can intercommunicate multiple
parallel processors using shared RAM is all it took for me to be WOWED.
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Another thing that also WOWED me is how great the Spin language is and how well coupled it is to the propeller
and how EASY it is to learn and use. I keep wondering why would anyone bother to use anything else other than
Spin (+assembly where needed).
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I am so glad that RobotBASIC can be so easily linked to the propeller and that the actions I mentioned above can be
so easily implemented in just a few days.
But ………learning more is going to be a pleasure…..by no means is it over……so I am looking forward to more days like
the last 4 days……………Thanks Parallax!
·Samuel
Are there any other microcontrollers that offer multiple stacks, locks and 32 bit floating point in software?
Too bad I couldn't get into it earlier.
Who's makin the "I Heart Cogs" bumper sticker?
A hardware haiku?
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JMH
Yes!
Leon
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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle
I'm afraid you will be stuck at lust and longing for a long time. The objects in the object exchange are mostly contributed by enthusiasts who are interested in sharing their efforts. It takes a lot of effort and time to document code well, even more to document adequately for beginners to use. There's little incentive to put in extra time to document well unless you get paid for it (and chained to your desk until it gets done).
A good way to learn about the Propeller and both Spin and assembly is to learn how someone else designed and coded something. Pick an object in the Object Exchange that either interests you or solves a problem that interests you and maybe has minimal documentation, get some kind of Propeller setup that can be used with the object, and try the associated demo. Get it to work for you, then learn how it works by experimenting with it, modifying it, expanding it, then documenting it for others. You'll learn a lot and you'll help the community..
With the Propeller Education Kit tutorials and some of the informal tutorials posted on this forum (and linked from the "sticky threads" at the top of the thread list), there's enough "getting started for beginners" stuff for now.
I love not having to mess around with interrupts and constantly worrying if some new bit of code will mess up some timing critical old bit of code. Goodbye forever to the bane of micro programming. hurray for cogs.
I do wish the eeprom was on-chip and secure...and I wish it was about half the price...these two issues limit its application in some projects for me.
But I am so much more productive with the Propeller its always the first tool I reach for whenever I possibly can (and sometimes when I probably shouldn't)
I simply can't wait to see what you guys do with the Prop II.
Great job Parallax...we don't say it often enough...keep up the great work!