A Beginner's Guide to the Propeller C3 (#32209)

doggiedoc

Let's see what this Puppy can do! (PropC3)

My goal for this thread is to provide a centralized location for Prop C3 information that is oriented towards novices like myself and to also to serve a journal of my exploration of this cool new "Credit-Card-Computer". I get it now... C3.



First off a few key links:

Unleashing the Propeller C3 by Andr

doggiedoc

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doggiedoc

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Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

@Doggiedoc,

There was a rather long thread about plugging in both the USB and power at the same time.

As I understand it, it is *almost* a non-issue. Apparently there is a small chance of creating a problem so the warning was added to keep the engineers happy. IIRC, there have been zero reported cases of people damaging the C3 or other similarly designed boards by have both USB and power connected.

I'll see if I can dig out the thread and let it give your perspective. I had mine plugged in for most of a day before I saw the same warning and had the same reaction. No problems here either.

OBC

doggiedoc

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for the info - I think mine's fine too. I searched for threads on the C3 but didn't see that one. I am hoping to make this a repository for good information and links. Not to mention I hope to learn a lot along the way as well as document it for reference.

Paul

RossH

I think that until Parallax finally gets around to fixing the forum search function, the C3 is doomed by it's very name - you can never find anything by searching for the term "C3" in the forum searches - even the advanced search fails.

Ross.

doggiedoc

@RossH,

Yes the search function isn't a great help. If you know of good threads that I can add to the top of this thread let me know.

Paul

schill

C3 power thread:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?128699-C3-power-and-USB-usage

I think there is another thread that discusses it as well.

The main upshot: Use a powered hub when you connect anything like this to your PC as basic protection and don't worry about it.

jhh

RossH wrote: »

I think that until Parallax finally gets around to fixing the forum search function, the C3 is doomed by it's very name - you can never find anything by searching for the term "C3" in the forum searches - even the advanced search fails.

Ross.

I noticed the same thing the other day, and due to my day job know what the "problem" likely is.

This generally has less to do with the web software (IE: forum) and more to do with the database underneath. I'm going to guess there's a good chance MySQL drives the forums here (it does most...), and that product defaults to 4 characters as the minimum sized key for "full text" queries, as searches generally use. I imagine other database products have similar settings. It's not that the forum doesn't try to look, it's that the database refuses to acknowledge the short keys when asked, as it's already prevented them from entering the index.

It's tunable, but there's a trade off. Going lower means bigger indexes to store/traverse/cache, downtime to re-index, slower lookups for each query, and so on.

And to end on a more relevant/practical note, one way to 'fix' the problem as a community, is to pick something like 'propC3' and use that longer name where we can remember to do so.

doggiedoc

My first attempts at doing "something" with the my new C3 (PropC3) was to load Mike Green's FemtoBasic and try to get it working with VGA. I'm too lazy to dig out the old little television to use TV_out which should work as coded if I am reading the comments correctly. I didn't quite get it figured out. I was using the version on the ftp server listed in the Post #1. Ultimately sleep called, so I'll work on it again later.