Open BASIC Stamp Editor ??
vaclav_sal
Posts: 451
If the product in this case "BASIC Stamp Editor" is free, why it cannot be Open BASIC Stamp Editor with source code available?
This editor is Parallax specific for limited audience, not like MS VS express editions.
It would be to Parallax business advantage to have competent developers who use the product to drive its development.
For example it would be nice to add comment / uncomment block ability and common RAM management for BS2e slots.
Vaclav
This editor is Parallax specific for limited audience, not like MS VS express editions.
It would be to Parallax business advantage to have competent developers who use the product to drive its development.
For example it would be nice to add comment / uncomment block ability and common RAM management for BS2e slots.
Vaclav
Comments
Or just the source code, either way would be amazing!
Basically... Parallax licensed a Delphi component that is at the core of the Basic Stamp editor, and they are unable to release the source code for it. I believe that they contacted the component author to try and work something out, but it wasn't possible.
http://dinosaur.compilertools.net/
LEX and YACC are at the core of creating tokens. It is a lot easier to understand the process in Linux where tutorials are free and so is the software to make it happy.
If someone lost a program file but was only concerned with making more copies of that, the eeprom could be leaded out to practically any eeprom programmer to glom the code and burn that to other eeproms.
Even with the raw code, the pin aliases and so on cannot be reconstructed.
If you do want to reverse engineer the compiler, the easy way is to look at the memory map the compiler produces. It would be much easier than dumping the stamp EEprom.
But, in all this time, and the BS2 has been around for nearly 20 years (what's the anniversary, anybody?), it's never been done.
[I think releasing a spec is tantamount to releasing the source.]
Anyway, why not just leave it go?
BTW A few years back I ran the PBasic editor under WINE on Linux. It worked except for the upload step. So I used that as an IDE and then used the 32 bit compiler to push it up to the stamp.
Very small. Minute. Miniscule.
(In a Hack-a-Day speak: Quite small. Quite minute. Quite miniscule.)
It's Gates' world, Martin, we just live in it. :zombie:
What's the beef? "MacBS2" doesn't work?
You can't get everyone.
Is an "open letter" a-la Dear Mr. Parallax Claus... in the offing here? (Barf.)
Additionally, the Basic Stamp Editor is way past overdue for upgrades, primarily the lack of Mac/Linux support and the need for any kind of "include" especially for multi-slot Stamps. MacBS2 is OK, but it hasn't been updated in a long time, does not support all the available Stamps, is slow as molasses, and does NOT support DEBUGIN.
http://mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/stamp-decode.html
PJ, don't look for me to write an open letter. Parallax is a business and they've probably decided to cash cow the BS2 while they invest in the Propeller and Propeller 2. My thinking was if I was a Mac or Linux only user, rather than write a PBasic compiler I would take the path of least resistance and use an Arduinio.
The only part that they can't release is the Delphi component, which, if I remember correctly, has to do with the editing functionality.
If the tokenizer source isn't released, it's most likely an IP issue. Which is fine... not everything needs to open-sourced. A good solution for the majority of users would be offering "official" command line tools to let people choose their own editor / IDE. For tools that don't change that often, the maintenance overhead should be very small.
Both the BasicStamp and the Propeller has something of a virtual machine that handles the tokens and makes everything work. That seems to be a trade secret. So be it. To me it is just an interesting puzzle and rather good success story for a small outfit in a world of barracudas.
The link you posted is to a very well done reverse engineering effort for the BS1. Presumably, Proteus has done the same sort of thing for the BS2 series to develop their VSM, but their work is proprietary.
MacBS2 is now broken. The latest MacOS no longer supports PowerPC programs which is how the most recent Mac tokenizer was compiled. Unless the tokenizer is recompiled by Parallax, there's no way for the author to update MacBS2. The only way to use a Mac now for Stamp development is to use Windows. Using Linux seems to depend on the distribution involved. The Linux tokenizer is compiled as a 32-bit library which can be used with some Linux distributions, but not all.
They're only in a difficult position if they fail to respond to market demands, with a resulting loss of sales.
It does not include the tokens that are specific to the multislot stamps, but it does cover all of the essential structures.
As has been mentioned, Chuck McMannis wrote Decoding the BASIC Stamp, for BASIC Stamp I.
Also mentioned, PBASIC 2.5 added several new control structures to the language, ones that were not present in earlier versions of PBASIC. Those are not new tokens for the chip itself, rather, they are compile time mixes of the existing tokens. I wrote an article here about how the new structures such as DO:LOOP are translated by the compiler into the old syntax of IF xxx :GOTO address.
I can't see how it would behoove Parallax to further development of BASIC Stamp tools, given their EOL status. The existing tools have served shall I guess 99.99% of needs.
I personally still use MacBS2 extensively on OS10.6.8, and I'll be a slow adopter of OS10.7 due to that and several other Power PC apps that I rely on. Maybe someone will come up with a port of Rosetta.
EOL is a dangerous term to use as it suggests an intention by a manufacturer to cease production after the current run (or production has already ceased and product is limited to what's currently in the pipeline). It usually connotes availability measured in months, not years. I prefer the term NFND (not for new design) for product that's been superseded but still in production.
Since other microcontroller products have replicated most or all of PBasic I would assume if the market continued to exist for these products, a solution could always be found to provide one, should Microchip simply blow up and cease to exist. It all depends on whether the market is large enough to support the engineering and manufacturing effort.
-- Gordon
I'm sorry for perhaps exaggerating the situation. It is the SX processor that is EOL and Parallax does have large stocks on-hand, enough for years. Microchip presumably will continue making the PIC16C57, used in the BS2, for as long as people buy it in sufficient quantities. Nonetheless, given the limited programming resources at Parallax and the movement of Parallax's products to the Propeller, there's not a lot of incentive to do much with the Stamp's development tools vs. putting resources into the Propeller's tools. The Stamp Tokenizer hasn't even been updated to handle the BS2px which has been on the market for several years, so I don't really have an expectation that it will be updated to work with MacOS Lion or 64-bit Linux.
The incentive should be to keep selling Basic Stamps...
The Propeller chip is a separate issue. While BST lets you use it on a Mac, I'm not sure it's beginner friendly enough to suggest.
All you need to connect a serial RFID reader to any computer is a serial port for that computer, and possibly a level converter for TTL to RS232 (though for read only a series resistor should be good for that). I would be seriously shocked if there weren't low cost USB adapters with drivers available for Mac.