A Long long time ago, in a galaxy far away: What led you to Parallax?

NWCCTV

So, I was just sitting here browsing through the Forums and got to thinking, it's been almost ten years since I started working with Parallax products and it got me to thinking about what led others to Parallax products. Here's my story: Many years ago, I knew nothing about stepper motors or servo motors. I watched something on the Internet that drew my interest, so I got on the web, found a couple used stepper motors and ordered them. After doing more research, I realized I needed a driver in order to make these motors move. I went to Radio Shack thinking they might have what I need. Boy, was I wrong. However, while browsing around I came across the "What's A Microcontroller" kit. I think it was like $89.99 or something then. I thought, "wow, kind of spendy for a few electronics parts". After reading the back of the manual I thought what the heck, I'll give it a shot. I brought the Serial version home and I was HOOKED!!!! It took me about two days to run through all the projects. After that I found the stepper drivers I needed on line, connected them to my Homework board and I was in heaven. Unfortunately it was not long after that, that life took an unexpected turn and I had to put the hobby away for a few years. Once I picked back up on it I bought my first Boe Bot on EBay and I have been going ever since. I have moved on to the Prop and a "Bigger" Bot is currently being built and I am a happy Parallaxian!

davejames

It's been just over 5 years since I wandered into the world of Parallax.

I knew that my signal switcher required some sort of uP or uC to run it and I'd heard about an easy to use uC from an engineer at work. So I poked about the Parallax store, liked what I saw and took the plunge.

One of the better decisions I've made!

Humanoido

I was building humanoid robots as long as I can remember, and discovered Parallax had walking legs. I bought the kit and discovered the BASIC Stamp processor. This led to the next generation of walking legs and writing thousands of PBASIC programs for it.

With encouragement from Ken Gracey, and my interests as a student, I began putting more stamps together in parallel and this happened. Someone on the Forum continually reminded me I should use the Propeller chip instead of the BASIC Stamp - by the time I built this with 40 props and this with over 100 props, I think he had serious regrets.

I'm always looking for something new, new ways to do things, new techniques and enhancements, new presentations, and Parallax parts are perfect for hobby experimentation, student projects and trying new things.

Parallax is really fantastic because of their innovative parts and processors, well known support and service, the high caliber of the people working there, and the ability to serve the varied interests of so many people across the world all at the same time.

Heater.

You know, I don't remember why I bought my first Propeller.

I do remember seeing it in the huge catalog of our local electronics distributor whilst browsing through it looking for micro-controllers.
I do remeber skipping straight passed it very quickly and moving on to the PICs and AVRs etc.

Why did I do that?
1) Eight 32 bits cores is interesting but "obviously" a space of only 512 instructions for "real code" is totally useless.
2) What's this "Spin" thing?.I've already had to learn a dozen languages over the years and really can't stomach YAFL (Work it out:)). Spin is not even any kind of standard or open sourced. Hopeless.
3) There were no dev tools for Linux or Mac. All there was was the Prop Tool which is Windows only. I'd already been bitten by that trap many times and did not want to go there again.

So what happened to pull me in?

Not sure. Was it that pile of dead AVR's on my desk that I could no longer program due to fuse bits getting set? Was it that pile of PICs that just started to Smile me off?

Perhaps.

On the plus side a couple of things turned up. There was a PASM assembler by Cliff Biffle that I could run on Linux. Then HomeSpun, then BST.

At some point I caved in to curiosity and grabbed a DIP Prop from the local ELFA store.

pacman

Roughly 5 years ago, I was involved in a project that needed to do a whole lot of stuff - the list kept getting bigger and none of the 'commercial' solutions were a good fit (even though the price tag kept going up) as each $ increase ALSO added a whole lot of stuff we didn't need.

In a moment of clarity (insanity?) I thought there must be an embed solution that we can use - again as the complexity increased the $ went up and the same 'added stuff you wont use' problem occurred . Coupled with interrupts - and interrupts interrupting interrupts....

I encountered Peter Jakacki via a different project through work - he sang the praises of the propeller - So I investigated.

WOW - what a brilliant chip - I was intrigued.

Joined the forums and saw just how helpful the 'forum' people were, the realised that some of those helpful people are ALSO the ones who worked for the company.

Took stock (and was surprised) by how honest and open those people were. A company that actually truly seems to be interested in more than just the $.

I was hooked (and some here are still probably regretting that day ).

I must ADDITIONALLY say - the reason I stay (other then the brilliant P1 chip) are all the same reasons that got me hooked.

Beau Schwabe

Wow.... let me see. In 1993 I found out about Parallax when a co-worker showed me an article in a magazine "Electronics Now" featuring a Basic Stamp I. At the time, I practically had to write a research paper to the company that I worked for in order to get approved for a purchase order. ... So I did, and received my first Basic Stamp I and I immediately started coding. Keep in mind that I have been programming in Basic, and Assembly since I was 12 ... (1981 if you do the math)... So BASIC was already very familiar to me, and immediately I was able to show my boss the potential, getting him hooked was 1/2 the battle. By the time the Basic Stamp II was released, I had at least 2 years under my belt of programing the Basic Stamp I and incorporating it into several work related projects. On the day that the Basic Stamp II was released, sight unseen we had placed an order for $2000 worth of Basic Stamp II's !!! I remember part of the Phone conversation, and it threw the Parallax employee at the time off a little when I didn't give them an exact number of BS2's, I just said that our budget was approved for $2000, just give me however many BS2's that works out to. :-) ... I would say that the rest is history, but even back in the "BBS2" (Before Basic Stamp II) days I was an active forum member and contributor and have remained so to this day. The BS2 helped propel our company (at the time Sabolich Prosthetic Research and Development) through several grants that otherwise might not have happened. I was with Sabolich until 2000 where at the time I was doing lots of board layout with my own circuit design / board design / etching / processing / testing / etc. A life changing event (marriage) caused me to move to Atlanta where I took a small break from the forum, but was right back in within about 2 years. During that time I started working for National Semiconductor in their high speed communications division where my background of board layout and design got my foot in the door because it meant that I could do IC layout. After a lot of training and 3 months worth of crash course schooling under National Semiconductors own courses, and wearing "the hat" that I was now a mentor and teacher to for the Georga Tech students utilizing our facility... the mentoring and teaching really re-enforced my personal knowledge of IC layout since if and when I did have a question, there was always someone withing a few cubicles away that I could ask and find out the correct answer. During my 5 years at NSC, I never forgot about Parallax, and in fact still remained very active in the forum. In 2005 there was a contest for Parallax that I had entered involving the SX chip. Around the time that the contest winners were to be announced, I receive an E-mail directly from Ken Gracey that said nothing more than "Beau, Call us!!" and Ken's number. So when I called, I honestly thought that I had won something from the SX contest that I had entered. Soon did I realize that I won alright, I had won the grand prize and Ken wanted to hire me. Apparently, they were keeping tabs on me and knew me from the forum and all of my contributions, and also knew that I was doing IC layout. ...and consequently they needed an IC layout guy. .... And now after my 20 year journey of being an active contributor in the forums, I can say "the rest is history" .... and hopefully I can grow and contribute another 20 years and then some to Parallax, a wonderful company that I feel in many ways that I might have been partly responsible for shaping and leading the way from within the forum.

Dmashek

I had an interest in learning electronics and I found the P.E.K. at Fry's.

LoopyByteloose

Good free documentation, a complete product, and a great support community. That was back in the BS2 era. Others had BS2 clones with more features, but they never quite expalined it all.

I had been aware of micro-controllers for quite some time, but the reality was that software packages were very expensive. And before the PICs... you had to build boards wtih added RAM and EEprom and even a UART. So there were a lot of burdens to get anything really started.. financial and physical.

Parallax made it easy for everyone to try a micro-controller.

These days, there are a lot of great chips that still don't have the documentaion and the support community to ease the pain. I suppose that is why they don't take the lead that the BS2 once created.

CuriousOne

I discovered that I need microcontrollers, which I can program to do the various things around. I needed simple, easy to understand language, a lot of code examples and good support. So I started looking online. Arduino was abandoned, since uses non-human friendly programming language. There also went propeller. I liked basic stamp and mikroe basic. So decided to give try to both of them. Actually, why I ordered basic stamp, is because I forgot my glasses, so I read "starting as lof as $47 in quantities of 10" as if I was purchasing 10 of stamps for $47 total, not ea. So I "ordered" in my understanding 10 of BS2 and 10 of BS2P modules. I was a bit puzzled when only 2 arrived, instead of 20 If not that my error, I would not bought basic stamps at all. Regarding the mikroe, I can surely say that it is complete b-s, and is nicely polished poo.

Heater.

Beau,Great story. Little bit spoiled by the absence of line breaks.I bet you are posting from Chrome?Any chance someone could fix this issue?

Microcontrolled

I got into Parallax 8 years ago, when I was a kid looking through a Radio Shack catalog for some new things to work with. I found the Boe Bot kit and was instantly intrigued. I had never heard of microcontrollers so I got the kit and worked through it. I loved it, but I eventually decided it wasn't powerful/versitile enough for my designs so 3 years later I moved on to the Propeller. The Propeller turned out to be a good go-to for quick designs, it's like the swiss-army knife of microcontrollers. Cheap, easy to program, and supports almost everything, so I've stuck with it ever since.

stamptrol

Way, way back in 1996 or maybe a bit earlier, I needed a low cost controller for the projects I was working on. I saw an ad on the back cover of an electronics magazine and thought the BS2 might fill the bill.

Starting with the Carrier board, I did a couple of truck scale controllers, then designed a general purpose controller board, then a dye injection system and on and on. Since then, there have been probably a 1000 or so Stamp projects (mostly BS2 with the odd BS2sx and px). Everything from a $300,000 tree harvester to a simple ASCII to BCD converter. Even today, the controllers come back for refurb and the Stamp failures have been miniscule.

The Stamps have been used in industrial training programs and loaned to schools and universities. They`ve been interfaced to some real odd-ball equipment and been part of some control systems that nobody else would touch. They have always worked reliably and predictably. Who could ask for more?

Cheers,

lanternfish

I had read about the Basic Stamp quite a while back but had flirted with PICs (frustratingly long project development time) and had been using RevEd Picaxes for a while when I stumbled on the Propeller. I liked the multiprocessor idea but it was not until a couple of years ago that I bought a couple of Quickstart's to a) learn more about the Prop and b) to use the excellent resource that is the OBEX to build some of the DMX512 projects that were on my wish list. Far easier to use a Prop than to muck around with polling and interrupts with a PIC.
Spin is relatively easy to program with and PASM is the same. It is the finer points of the two and the Prop that take time to , pleasingly, learn.
Winning the ELEV-8 name contest enabled me to get a couple of Protoboards (and a few other bits besides). I have Also bought a few of Cluso's 1" x 1" boards .

dmagnus

Many years ago (10,15, 20?) I came across an article on the Basic Stamp. I thought it was really interesting, but wasn’t ready to try to add another language to my life. I am a Software Developer using Microsoft development systems, so I’ve been doing various forms of Basic, C, C# for many years. The main problem with the Basic Stamp was that I didn’t really have an application for it. If the BOE had been available, I probably would have started sooner.
About 5 years ago, I saw an article somewhere on the Internet about Parallax. I remembered the name from my exposure to the Basic Stamp years before and went to the website. I was amazed at the wealth of products, reasonable prices and the Forums – what a gold mine!
I bought a BOE-BOT, put it together and had a lot of fun with it. Then I saw the Stingray, bought one of those. I wanted to “graduate” to the Propeller. Now I’m going to sell my Stingray because I really want a Thumper. I still have my BOE-BOT, but I’ve upgraded it to the Propeller. I also have the PPDB and just got my Propeller Activity Board and am eager to start with C on the Prop.
I finally have a practical application. I have a big, old cruiser with twin 4.7L gas engines. I want to build a fuel totalizer system using the Propeller and some form of communication to the bridge for a display of fuel burn, tank quantity, etc. I’ve seen a couple of things on the Forum that I might be able to adapt to my needs. That’s my project for next winter.
Somewhere along the line I saw Ken’s post on the forum for the ELEV-8. I followed the development and got one of the second runs. I went whole-hog and got the Hoverfly Pro and GPS. That hasn’t been the greatest experience – I still don’t have it working properly in spite of sending the Pro back to Hoverfly for “adjustment”. But I’ll get it worked out eventually.
I am so impressed by this company. I have never experienced this level of customer satisfaction as I have from Parallax. I’m hooked forever.

erco

Sheer desperation.

xanatos

Actually, it was because of a dream.

I bought my first BS2 back in 1998, but I never really had the time to even get started with it. Fast forward to about 2009. I was looking into creating an automatic coil winder to turn out secondaries for Tesla Coils, so I had been looking at a lot of counter chips. Electronics was in my head. I had also been seeing "What's a Microcontroller" at Radio Shack, and while it interested me, the price, for what I perceived as just an expensive toy for me, made it so I couldn't justify it.

Then one night I had a dream. I was at some sort of tech show, and there was this guy with what looked like a quad-copter. But when I got closer, I saw it had NO rotors. No moving parts at all. Just a bank of thin coils that made it look like some sort of flat flower almost. It silently hovered in space, operated by a remote control. He could make it go up, down... just like a quad-rotor. Not a sound. And in the dream, my focus was drawn right to the center of the board with the coils, and I realized that I recognized the heart of the unit. It was a Basic Stamp. I remember him saying something about it driving the "phase angles" of the coils.

I bought "What's a Microcontroller" the next day.

While I haven't yet revolutionized human travel, the Stamp did launch a new career for me and has been probably the best $89.99 I have ever spent in my life. The return on investment has been staggering! And I've had a LOT of fun.

Dave Hein

Basic Stamp >> SX >> Prop

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

This...

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/86313-Commodore-64-Emulator

xanadu

I came here from the planet Micropopuless in a small galaxy about 30,000 light years away. They sent me here to collect as much information as I can about the BOE Bot. My mission was to relay intel back home for the upcoming invasion.


Since I’ve been here and met a few BOE Bots I’ve decided they shouldn’t be abducted and probed. Now I just lay low hoping nobody from Micropopuless finds out I switched sides. Occasionally I transmit fake intel back to confuse them, for instance they think the BS2 has 1000 pins, and AA batteries can put out a megawatt.

jazzed

BasicStamp BOEBOT kit about 20 years ago.

Whit

The BOEBot for sure! About seven or eight years ago, I decided to start playing with robotics.I visited the A-robot site, which said it was better than the BOEBot - though it used a Parallax BASIC Stamp.

I figured the BOEBot must be the one to beat - so I came to Parallax. I loved the Forums and soon found that Mike Green, Phil Pilgrim and many of you knew what I wanted to know.

I was broke at the time and built some small projects from salvaged parts ala Solarbotics and BEAM - but saved my money and got a BOEBot - I've been a Parallax guy ever since - I am also a big Scribbler/S2 believer and love the Prop - I am excited about the new LEARN C stuff too!

Parallax has gotten me more into electronics in general too! But Robotics is main interest.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Too many years ago to count I bought a PIC programmer from Parallax and used their sensible-mnemonic PIC assembler. In the winter of 1992, a friend of mine, who had similar interests, and I drove down the Baja peninsula and camped on the beach. After too many Pacificos, we decided that we could make a better programmer than Parallax was selling by including a built-in UV eraser and turning it into a reprogrammable emulator. That was the beginning of Bueno Systems. But we never did the programmer/emulator, focusing instead upon industrial linescan imagers, which I had some experience with but which we struggled to sell enough of to support two payrolls. The cameras used the TSL1401 linear array sensor, then sold by a Texas Instruments division that was later sold to its employees, becoming TAOS. As a consequence we were in very close contact with the TI/TAOS engineers. After I bought out my partner in 1998, TAOS contacted me about a "strategic partnership" they were forming with a company called Parallax, and asked if I would be interested in designing a color sensor to be sold jointly by the two companies. When I said yes, they put me in contact with a fellow by the name of Ken Gracey. So here I am now, practically in bed with the company I was intending to compete with. My relationship with Parallax, the Gracey family, and the entire Parallax crew has been one that most designers/vendors can only dream of. I feel very lucky to have made this connection.

-Phil

localroger

I used a few BS1's in the 1990's for simple projects at work, but what alerted me to the existence of the Propeller and really got me rolling was a Hackaday article about the YBox2. Here was this project in an Altoids tin doing a keyboard/video terminal with ethernet. That got me looking at the Propeller, and when I realized how much hardware I/O had already been emulated in software I bought a Demoboard to check it out. Although I use it for my own projects most of my Propeller toys and code-writing is done for work, and it's been the basis of several very lucrative projects there. It's nice when the boss pays for your toys :-)

Bean

I ordered a BS2 when they first came out (not sure what year that was).
I was greatly impressed with the documentation.
I've been using Parallax products ever since.

Bean

ElectricAye

I grew bored with Montana Wildhack.
As an act of mercy, the Tralfamadorians finally released me from prison.
That year, as a consolation prize, the Nobel Committee sent me a strange box that asked me "What's a Microcontroller?"
Answering that question resulted in a religious experience.
The Time Capsule had been opened and I was set free.
The stone rolled away.
I was struck by lightning.
The cows came home.
I began walking on water.
After doing a string of TV commercials for Dos Equis, I had enough money to demonstrate that my one-man suborbital surfboard could make auroral skywriting an Olympic sport.
I then won 41 gold medals by doing just that. (Stick that in your pipe, Michael Phelps, and smoke it.)
Nowadays I work on the next Coolest Thing in All of Human History and plant BitCoins at the beach for old hippies to trip on.

Whit

@ElectricAye - That is really more of a West Coast answer...

erco

What led me to Parallax?

My Arduino-controlled divining rod.




(Just trying to keep up with ElectricAye, who has a snappy answer for everything!)

ElectricAye

erco wrote: »

.... divining rod....

Is that what you call that little thing?

erco

What, an Ardweenie?

Moderators are standing by...

ajward

Hasn't been all that long ago that I ran across Parallax. I've been interested in electronics, and a lot of other scientific things, since... well, forever. My first Parallax exposure was, I think, my buddy Bob, my BoeBot. Then, I'm pretty sure, came the Propeller Education Kit. A blue Scribbler slipped into the house at some point. All along this path were the orders for various gadgets, widgets, thingamabobs and geegaws. Recently, a very nice person provided me a Scribbler S2 (Thank You!).
And, that in a nutshell, is how my desk has become cluttered with all manner of electrical/electronic stuff! All dedicated to my goal of, as stated in my signature... Aimless Tinkering! Only kind of kidding about the "World Conquest" part. Anyone who wants to rule the =whole world=, clearly has serious issues! ;-)

Amanda

Computers!
My first computer was an Altair 8800A... yeah with all the toggle switches, which I foolishly sold.
Next was a Cosmac ELF kit which was a lot of fun to build.
Following that was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I with 16K and level 2 basic. After tiring of all the Basic example programs, I disassembled the ROM by hand so I could write the same boring Basic programs in assembly!
Next was a TRS-80 Model 4... with floppy drives... WOW!!!!
The PC phase, which lasted for years, began with a 10MHz peecee XT that was H**Y C**P fast! I got a deal on a Shugart 5MB hard drive for $179. I mean FIVE MEGABYTES!!! How could I ever use =all= that storage space? ;-)

LoopyByteloose

I'd love to hear more... this could become the best thread of 2013... after all it is already July.