Retrieve code from old BS2 Chip?

gggplaya

Hi,
··· A university designed a product for my company years ago,· we gave them grant money and they designed a product to meet our needs, and the students got some valuable learning experience.· That being said, i want to modify what they made to better suit our needs, they made us 2 of these units which use parallax BS2 chips all over the machine.· Being university students, they never gave us very good documentation or the firmware code for these chips.· Those students are long gone and so is the code.·

Is there a way to retrieve the code from a parallax Basic Stamp 2 chip?· I just want to modify it with another input and output, i don't want to have to reverse engineer the whole thing and take the time to write my own code to get it all working again.

--Thanks in advance.

Mike Green

Alas, there's no practical way. It would be difficult, but possible to remove the EEPROM from the BS2 module and read the program from it, but it's in the form of compiled interpretive code which would have to be hand de-compiled to get something that might be practically modifiable. It's cheaper and easier to reverse engineer the thing. You'll get better documentation as well.

This question comes up from time to time. It's possible to do, but very time and labor intensive and complicated by the fact that the format of the interpretive code is proprietary to Parallax, not publicly documented anywhere, and is one of the very few things that they consider and treat as strictly a trade secret.

Post Edited (Mike Green) : 2/18/2010 4:16:19 PM GMT

gggplaya

ok, thanks. That's what i was afraid of.