Propeller Activity Board.
electromanj
Posts: 270
Hi folks. I was just wondering what the status was on the activity board that was mentioned during the live feed from the expo, as well as the new tutorials for PropGCC.
Thanks,
traVis.
Thanks,
traVis.
Comments
Tomorrow our marketing team will start making the announcements around this hardware and the associated program.
[sales guy ON]. Order early, order many Propeller Activity Boards. They're going to be out of stock for a long time as our production tries to keep up. As a backup you can also run the programs with the PropBOE, the flagship. [sales guy OFF].
But the program they'll announce isn't about the Propeller Activity Board, though it's a necessary ingredient. The real purpose is to educate all of our customers in multicore programming in a easy-to-use C language. The future is here and you'll be part of it.
Ken Gracey
Depends on how you look at it. The "C" is standard but libraries with specialized functions have been written.
That's of course correct and I didn't mean to imply any different.
Hard to know. Will the ms C compiler cross compile C code into pasm or machine code that will run on a propeller? Remember C is a language not a compiler. There is a group (I think it's at least in part funded by Parallax) that's been working on making changes to GCC to allow it to cross compile C for the propeller. It's available for free.
I don't know of any effort to port a C# compiler to cross compile for the prop.
"ms C compiler cross compile" ... No. Compilers don't magically generate code for new machines. There's a lot of work involved, particularly to get efficient code out, and a lot of work to write the basic libraries that need to be in assembly for that particular machine and operating system along with modifications for other libraries written in C, but specific to whatever operating system is used.
Thanks for mentioning Catalina C. It had slipped my mind. I apologize to Ross for forgetting about it and for any confusion I may have caused.
You don't need the activity board to use PropGCC or any of the educational material. The activity board just fulfills the need for a standard platform to base the examples on, but it doesn't have anything special in the hardware.
PropGCC IS the compiler used by SimpleIDE for compiling C & C++ code. GCC has become a standard open-source compiler that has been ported to many systems and architectures. propgcc is a recent port developed for the propeller chip. You can download propgcc itself and use it from the command line on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It will compile your C or C++ sources and with the included propeller-load tool will download the compiled output to your propeller-based board.
SimpleIDE's installation includes the propgcc compiler, tools and libraries that it also uses to compile and download to your propeller-based board. Propgcc and SimpleIDE work with many (almost all the typical) propeller boards, using config files for each board type. propgcc supports standard C, C++ as well as additional prop-specific features.
The C example code may have dependence on some of the unique features of several boards. The Prop BOE and Activity board are similar in many but not all aspects, so I expect that most examples will work on either board. Any steering towards SimpleIDE is most likely intended because of the libraries that it includes supporting these boards.
dgately
John
'schdoc' - Schematic
'pcbdoc' - Printed Circuit Board
'prjpcb' - Project file for Printed Circuit Board
'outjob' - Job file for board
Looks like Altuim extensions.
I was under the impression all Parallax Open Source was going to be DipTrace. Evidently this is not the case.