Is the basic stamp what I need?

philip745

I need a microcontroller for use in a signal processing application. Basically, the device will look at a 4 bit wide binary data stream, look for invalid data, clean up the data, and output it on 4 output lines. Since I already have a basic stamp homework board, it seems like a good place to start. But since this will end up in a commercial product I have a few questions I am hoping you guys with more experience can help me with. That said, here are my questions;

- The data rate is not high, but the microcontroller will lie between switches of a control stick and the CPU in a piece of industrial equipment. Probably the best way to describe it is a videogame. As such propagation delays through the microcontroller could be problematic if they have a noticeable effect on control. Do you think the Basic Stamp's 4K IPS wil be a problem?

- The price of the basic stamp seems quite high for this application, even in quantity. Is it possible to develop on the stamp and then go into production on a less "developer packaged" version? $7-9 is workable, $30 isn't.

- What else am I missing?

Duane Degn

I don't think the Basic Stamp is a good choice for a production product. As you noted, it's just too expensive.

I'm sure there are lots of other microcontroller that could do the job for a lot less money.

I personally like the Propeller but that might be over kill for this application. While the Propeller costs a lot less than the Basic Stamp I think there are probably other microcontrollers that would cost even less and still meet your needs.

I don't know much about other microcontroller so I'll let others give you alternatives to the Prop (and Basic Stamp).

One plus of the Prop is it is pretty easy to it get up and running.

Duane

Mike Green

There is an OEM version of the Stamp where you can leave out the voltage regulator and RS232 i/o circuitry, but it's still more expensive than you want. The Propeller is under $7 in quantity, but you'll need a 5MHz crystal and 24LC256 EEPROM at a minimum which will run you another $1.25 roughly in quantity. That's under your $9 limit. The Prop certainly has the speed for your task and more. It would be cheaper, but more work to use some other micro-controller like an 8-bit PIC or AVR.