Does anyone on the Parallax forums still help or support users who use the SX?

eagletalontim

Just wondering if any help is given to those of us who still have extra SX chips around and have projects to mess around with? I have posted 3 threads and not one of them has been answered much less posted on Is there a spot in the Parallax forum to post SX specific questions? The only area that has anything to do with SX is a few sticky threads so I don't think I can post there.

Sorry if I may sound rude, but I can't find alot of good articles in the new forum design.

LoopyByteloose

Hi,
Yes there is an SX Forum under 'Retired Product'. Also www.sxlist.com still seems active.

Those would be the right places to post queries.

At first I felt seriously disappointed that the SXes were no longer part of Parallax's mainstream. There certainly are some projects that don't need a Propeller. From what I gather, Microchip's legal department has pushed to retire the SXes as they mimic PIC chips to some extent (though are much faster and program a bit differently).

There are a lot of good choices in similar 8 bit processors and that makes the economics of supporting the SX even more difficult. The AVRs and PICs offer ADC within their package and other features. And TI is now trying to push their products to the forefront of this rather crowded corner of the microcontroller marketplace.

The main things are that one can still buy SXes and SXKeys. Also, there is a community of users and SX/B has evolved to version 2-beta.

It is just that all the activity with the Propeller and soon to be Propeller2 demands Parallax's support. After all, survival is an on-going issue.

eagletalontim

Thank you for letting me know about that! I will look into the SXList site. Seems a little hard to navigate, but I should be able to find my way around there eventually The Prop is way to "big" of a chip for 90% of my projects so the SX best fits me right now. The problem with the EOL for the SX is that I sell a product commercially that uses the SX chip and the Prop does not have a small enough DIP to fit in place of the SX. I don't have the skills to solder the surface mount prop to any boards and can't afford to spend over $10 for each chip due to the price I sell my product at. I guess once the SX's are gone, I will have to remove my product from production

Leon

Replace the SX by a PIC24.

hover1

eagletalontim wrote: »

. I guess once the SX's are gone, I will have to remove my product from production

As Parallax has said a few time, SX's should be available for 10 years+. I would not worry, unless someone buys up an inordinate amount, and them you might purchase a small lot from them.

As for the SX Forums not displaying recent posts, that is a problem being worked on:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?127805-Wrong-order-being-displayed

For now, adjust the Thread Display Options for something other than "Last Day"

Jim

RobotWorkshop

Since the SX is EOL it may take a little longer to get answers to some SX questions but if you ask questions in the SX forum then they usually do get answered. That way they will come up when people search on the SX forum.

If you ask in the General forums then it is LESS likely to get answered since I look for SX related threads in the SX forum. You should probably ask one of the moderators to move this to that forum.

LoopyByteloose

It seems rather embarrasing, but Microchip has chips that are DIP compatible (for the most part) with the SX18 and the SX28. If you don't need more than 20Mhz, the 16f84 and the 16f57 are likely to do fine. And for production, they may even be less costly.