Basic stamp practical performance examples available?

CuriousOne

Basic stamp manual declares number of operations per second, but this is quite hard to scale to real life. My Z80 was also capable of 750000 register-to-register operations per second, but in real life this was nothing that impressive

Can someone provide an example of complex project, which is entirely handled by basic stamp? I mean some complex, multi i/o device, operating in real time.

For example, there's matrix of 64 keys (8x8), they should be controlled almost instanteously (response delay less than 10ms) and up to 8 simultaneous keypresses should be handled. Device should output specific data on each keypress or combination via the SPI interface. Is this possible with basic stamp?

Mike Green

This website has lots of information on the execution timing of Basic Stamp statements and operations. Click on the "App-Notes" link at the bottom of the page.

In terms of Basic Stamp performance, so much depends on the specific details of what you want to accomplish. Often the most time critical stuff is offloaded to a peripheral processor of some sort, so a keypad or keyboard interface does the actual scanning and conversion to characters and makes them available on demand by the Stamp. Similarly, displays, whether video output or LCD, have built-in controllers that accept ASCII characters with control codes and the controller handles the video generation and interpretation of the control codes. Servos that require a control pulse about every 20ms are often handled by an external controller that accepts either information on servo position or speed or a single servo control pulse that is reissued by the controller until changed.

If you want to have several such high-overhead low-level control functions and overall management in one controller without peripheral processors, consider using a Propeller instead.