I started working with MPU's at my first tech job in 1976. We we working with the Intel 8008 at the time.
My Dad and I built an Altair 8800 in 1976. Got into 6800's and then 6809's with the Coco 2 and 3.
This is what led me to Parallax:
I still keep that issue around to reminisce about all the companies that are no longer, a little blurb about the new BOEBot, and the MONSTER 47GB SCSI hard drive for $695.
As a kid I dabbled with the Radio Shack P-box kits. Remember those? I still have one that works... the neon light kit, wired as sequential. It's amazing how bad your soldering can be and yet still function
So, when I was looking for a new hobby about 3 years ago, I went looking for a way to continue my electronics education. I was impressed (and still am) with the flexiblity of the Propeller, the minimal support parts needed, and the support of the forums.
(The fact that the propeller chip's only $8 and the development tools are free helped also.)
Walter
P.S. I'm not really sure my soldering skills are any better than 40+ years ago
I have told this story in bits and pieces here over time, but maybe I makes sense to tie it all together.
My interests have always centered around these things. In the late 80's I was working with various 8 bit computers, 6502, 6809 and a CP/M card in an Apple 2. At that time, I had the computers, and old 60Mhz Tube Tek scope, a transmitter or two and those were tube as well, and misc things like TV's I fixed to use for displays, game systems, etc... I had started to control things with the computers, and was starting to advance into the field when I took a turn toward manufacturing.
Did that for a long time, automating various things and getting good at engineering software, data management, ans systems, which I still do today.
the bug never quite went away though. I kept at this stuff on a hobby basis, using the now retro computers for various things when a friend linked me to the early Propeller discussion. I took one look at the Demoboard schematics and some code and had to jump in, ordering one right away!
I believe this was just a short time after P1 had released. I got that board out and in a day was doing crazy things with little effort. Somewhere in there I met Chip and we talked about a lot of this basic stuff, and that friendship and common ground along with the many other great people at Parallax and the forum helped to keep me going.
Thanks all for a lot of fun, good education, good times and insane smarts. We are a great group, and the Parallax "way" for lack of a better term really is something special.
I started with it in 2009, based on web research.
I've always liked 99% of Parallax products (but there was a "graphic" VFD that just wasn't on the mark).
Each of the write-ups, harware, and downloadable software worked as advertised.
This is not the experience I have had with some other vendors.
As a kid I dabbled with the Radio Shack P-box kits. Remember those?
I was about 14 when Radio Shack discontinued those and the local store liquidated their inventory for $1 apiece. I BOUGHT THEM ALL. I've still got a small pile of the enclosures. (If you need a 100 KHz crystal I also have 5 of those.) I lost my completed kits when I moved out; my favorite was the shortwave radio. I added an external audio amp and vernier tuning cap to mine and it was amazing the stations I could pull in with it. Anyway, I've got a drawer full of those NE2 bulbs (I think I got them from Poly Paks, remember THEM?) and I've been thinking about grabbing the online PBox docs for that neon light flasher and duplicating it. Maybe with an ExpressPCB circuit board this time. Some things have improved...
Waaaaay back in 1980 - 1981 I was loading individual instructions in 2708 EPROMS for the first of the Z8 microcomputers. (I didn't want to pay the high price for their expensive compiler, so I did it the hard way.) The project was intended to track and record daily feed rations for dairy cattle. I had unlimited time and the help and encouragement of a brilliant CE / professor. The 2 Z8's were in communication with eachother, and they were on battery backup with brownout detection. The project failed because I ultimately could not reliably detect the individual animals. But it sure was fun to see the result of having wire wrapped more gold pins than I could count.
That said, I also began reading, and couldn't wait for the next edition of Circuit Cellar to show up in my mailbox. If I remember correctly, Parallax began advertising their Basic Stamp in the early '90s on the inside of the front cover. I've been a customer and have been having FUN with Parallax stuff ever since.
I was COBOL programmer, living in Germany and working on Inventory-systems to attach to OMRON Cash registers.
Them OMRON things were quite expensive, around $20.000 each.
We decided to build a cash register out of 268 PCs booting from Novell 3.12(?) images.
To attach a scale we needed some conversion Chip and I stumbled over a new product.
"Die Basic-Briefmarke" (Basic-Stamp). Sold by a company in Bonn, Germany (pullmoll?).
It worked and everybody was happy. That was about 1991.
I moved on in my live as programmer and rarely see any COBOL code anymore.
Even if MOST (by lines of source) of the source-code in this world is still in COBOL.
(For people not knowing COBOL sources - it is the most verbose language I know of. No comments needed at all)
Fast Forward.
About 2 years ago I stumbled over a handbook of that cash register we build 1992. I found it here at my mums place in California. And I googled Basic Stamp. (BIG MISTAKE)
And then I got hooked. First by the forum and then by the propeller.
Like a lot of us I started programming at a time where you were able to understand/grasp/grook the whole system. Say Altair?,Wang 2000, TRS80, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, whatever.
Later on I got used to those layers of layers of layers protecting me from the hardware. I still work as a programmer but the FUN is gone.
And PARALLAX gave all of that FUN back to me. In opposite to ANY other mc you have full control over the hardware if you want.
Just your code. Nothing else runs. No need for datasheets for using I2C,UART,SPI, whatever on this or that pin and live with it or don't do it.
It's all yours. You can use stuff from other people but you don't need to. You can bitbang whatever you want with your own code...
If you don't build it, you don't really own it.
The next mistake I made was that I went to PARALLAX by person. Visiting my first PARLLAX Conference.
Now I am doomed forever. I am REALLY impressed by the way the company is working and how/why they do it.
Since I was like 9, I wanted to build robots, but folks told me they were too complex and expensive. When I graduated with a CS degree, my first job was using FORTH. It seemed perfect, but the "official" version of forth was still too expensive, and FORTH could not reach its potential until a multi-core system was available. I gave up, and switched to the BASIC stamp, which was fine but made me claustrophobic. I heard about the prop, and when I read about Cliffe Biffle's Propeller forth, I got a demo board. I never got propellerforth to run, but I was able to contact Sal Sanci. I told him my sketchy plan to teach kids about robots using forth. He said "that's interesting enough." If I would do my quality and process thing for propforth, he would do "what ever" to help my efforts. How about that? As a result, the package is much more refined than a personal tool would be.
Now I'm finally beginning to introduce kids to making their own bots from scratch, using a "better than pro" real time development embedded environment, for the lowest possible cost. The thought being that only about 10% of folks are cut out to be engineers, so it has to be low risk so we can give the opportunity to everyone, and reach the entire 10%.
So I guess my project took 40 years to prepare for the arrival of the hardware, and five years to get moving.
I've posted bits & pieces before and there's some information here. I started in computers in high school back in the plugboard programming / punch card era and with an IBM1440 business computer. I got my electronics experience via ham radio (N5BAL). I majored in computers through college and graduate school and worked for Datapoint's research department through the 1970s when they browbeat Intel and TI into building what was to become the 8008, developed ARCNET (a commercial competitor to Ethernet) and IR-based wireless networking, and developed the first commercial distributed networked OS (RMS) ... heady times until they imploded due to poor management. In recent times, my wife (a sculptor) needed some animation for one of her pieces involving a servo and a scrolling text display on a TV. I had seen some articles on the Stamps and bought a BS2, servo controller, and a BOB-I for the video ... worked great ... still works. I was very excited when Chip started talking about the Propeller. It was a nice clean multiprocessing microcontroller design, well thought out. I've been very impressed over the years with Parallax's commitment to transparency and openness and their generosity as well. Nice people too.
I don't know if my introduction qualifies as a "long, long time ago", but I can share anyway.
I first found out about Parallax in my university microprocessor course. My professor loved Parallax and was looking for an opportunity to learn the Propeller. He figured that there wouldn't be a better way to learn than to teach it. We were coming off of PIC programming, so the Propeller was a wonderfully refreshing change.
Chip also was kind enough to give our class a virtual tour of Parallax using his laptop webcam. During the tour, I couldn't help but think that Parallax looked like a really cool place to work. And, as luck would have it, they were hiring in their education department. I applied immediately and the rest, as they say, was history.
Back in the late 70's or early 80's I bought a Heathkit H8 and taught myself assembly programing. I added boards, changed to the Z80 processor, wrote a task swithcher for multitasking etc. I got a PC with 64K ram and a 20MB HDD and eventually the H* got religated to the dump. My primary reason for learning ASM was to poke at the outputs.
Jump forward a few years, and while working in my radioshack store I see the Basic Stamp What is a Microcontroller, and I had to have one.
Fastforward again, and I ended up in the Propeller world with a side trip through SX land.
Jim
About a month ago I purchased an Arduino Duo and I have been building circuits with that. In order to program an Arduino, I need a computer and pressed an elderly ThinkPad T41 XP machine into service. I had never mixed computing and my electronics/model railroad hobby before this.
Just after, I was in an electronics shop the other side of town and saw the Boe-Bot (amongst other kits). I purchased it to see what it might be like and that led here.
I don't know if my introduction qualifies as a "long, long time ago", but I can share anyway.
Jessica, you're a breath of fresh air in here. So much so, that we old guys with decades of Parallax history to recount won't assume that your comment was in any way flaunting your youth.
I don't remember how I found the BS2 back in High school, but I got it for an over-ambitious robot project that collapsed under it's own poorly defined weight. Of the various limits of the BS2 that i found, the lack of easy multi-tasking was the biggest one. Quite simply, it's easiest for me to develop software as a series of interacting sub-systems.
The next sampling of parallax products was with the SX. The speed and low cost roped me in, but SXB wasn't out yet and I just couldn't get my brain around how minutely SX asm required a problem to be divided. (only having conditional skips didn't help either...)
The Propeller was what finally hooked me about 5 years ago. An 8 core 32-bit microprocessor designed and documented by Parallax? Yes please!
Jessica, you're a breath of fresh air in here. So much so, that we old guys with decades of Parallax history to recount won't assume that your comment was in any way flaunting your youth.
HA! Glad to hear it.
Though really I'm just in awe, slightly jealous, and a little intimidated by everyone's vast knowledge and experience! I dub thee all 'radtastic'. :P
Nice! Welcome and have fun. It's a great chip, and the next one is shaping up to be just as great. If you have trouble, give it a little slack and pound the questions home here. It's worth it to punch through.
One day I realized that I really should know something about electronics...that was years before I found Parallax. I tried everything. There was no way in. I bought books... lots of them. I tried to read all of them... no use.
I bought a parallel processing system... based on ADA... and hired a guy to explain it to me... not good.
Then I found Forest Mims... it all seemed to be within reach, except I couldn't figure out how to generate -12V. Then I just started buying stuff. And no matter what I bought, I didn't have enough time to actually make it work.
Fast forward 10 years: Google arrives. I find a reference to something called a "Propeller," a processor that doesn't have to stop doing one thing in order to start doing something else. So, it seems like it might have enough
utility to justify serious study... and it didn't require me to figure out -12V. I get a couple of boards... and they actually work without me doing anything except plugging them in. Heaven.
I heard about the YBox2 (from LadyAda) a few years ago when it came out, and hearing that it was powered by a 8-core microcontroller that was capable of generating composite video, had an ethernet interface, could be programmed via a simple web client such as curl, and other things I'm sure. By far the thing that piqued my interest the most was that it was an 8-core processor. I wasn't (and am not now) an expert in microcontroller programming or general knowledge but was sure that had to be unique. Watching all the things the makers and the community have created with it or interfaced it with has never ceased to amaze me. I haven't been as active with electronics or uC's as I'd like to be in my spare time, but I can only hope that I'll come up with "that idea" that just sparks my interest enough to keep going/growing with it. Until then, I'll continue to lurk for the most part, and dabble with a new project or board here and there.
That's exactly what happened to me!!! I was in radio shack and they had this What's a micro controller marked down in the bin, it was cheap and came with the basic stamp education board, and I thought, sure, why not! I got hooked but dumped the Basic Stamp (still have it though) and went right to SX. Then shortly afterward, They stopped making the SX and I thought well that is no platform in case I wanted to go commercial with something (fat chance so far). I was starting to think this whole micro controller thing is moving too fast for me so I started looking a PIC but then, the newly released Prop. 8 core processors pops up and, I thought, well, I'm getting in over my head but what the heck. I never looked back, all because I was in Radio Shack looking for etching fluid, which, they didn't have.
I read an article on the Basic stamp a long long time ago and found a programmable chip interesting enough to store in memory but didn't start the hobby then.
Fast forward to a few years ago and I was in the soldering training program at Lockheed Martin thinking I might get into this electronics hobby if I get the job.
Washed out in the training program, didn't get the job but did pick up a new hobby.
I saw the NOVA DARPA Grand Challenge video program a few years back and thought it was just about the coolest thing since landing on the moon. It got me interested in programming and electronics, well outside of my physics and mechanical engineering background. A collegue had previously introduced me to the Stamp which seemed to me a solution looking for a problem. With my new found interest, I bought the Stamp BOE Bot, did the exercises in that and most of the other Stamps in class series. Graduated to the Prop and continue to enjoy learning new stuff all the time and the forum fellowship.
I was in middle school reading "Electronics For Dummies" studying all of the parts trying to find what they are used in. After I had memorized what they were and what they were used in, i came into a chapter about microcontrollers. It BLEW MY MIND... all of the possibilities!! Did research online and parallax seemed like the best choice for me. I asked for a kit for christmas and after i got the lights blinking i just couldn't stop ahaha
Comments
My Dad and I built an Altair 8800 in 1976. Got into 6800's and then 6809's with the Coco 2 and 3.
This is what led me to Parallax:
I still keep that issue around to reminisce about all the companies that are no longer, a little blurb about the new BOEBot, and the MONSTER 47GB SCSI hard drive for $695.
So, when I was looking for a new hobby about 3 years ago, I went looking for a way to continue my electronics education. I was impressed (and still am) with the flexiblity of the Propeller, the minimal support parts needed, and the support of the forums.
(The fact that the propeller chip's only $8 and the development tools are free helped also.)
Walter
P.S. I'm not really sure my soldering skills are any better than 40+ years ago
My interests have always centered around these things. In the late 80's I was working with various 8 bit computers, 6502, 6809 and a CP/M card in an Apple 2. At that time, I had the computers, and old 60Mhz Tube Tek scope, a transmitter or two and those were tube as well, and misc things like TV's I fixed to use for displays, game systems, etc... I had started to control things with the computers, and was starting to advance into the field when I took a turn toward manufacturing.
Did that for a long time, automating various things and getting good at engineering software, data management, ans systems, which I still do today.
the bug never quite went away though. I kept at this stuff on a hobby basis, using the now retro computers for various things when a friend linked me to the early Propeller discussion. I took one look at the Demoboard schematics and some code and had to jump in, ordering one right away!
I believe this was just a short time after P1 had released. I got that board out and in a day was doing crazy things with little effort. Somewhere in there I met Chip and we talked about a lot of this basic stuff, and that friendship and common ground along with the many other great people at Parallax and the forum helped to keep me going.
Thanks all for a lot of fun, good education, good times and insane smarts. We are a great group, and the Parallax "way" for lack of a better term really is something special.
I've always liked 99% of Parallax products (but there was a "graphic" VFD that just wasn't on the mark).
Each of the write-ups, harware, and downloadable software worked as advertised.
This is not the experience I have had with some other vendors.
I was about 14 when Radio Shack discontinued those and the local store liquidated their inventory for $1 apiece. I BOUGHT THEM ALL. I've still got a small pile of the enclosures. (If you need a 100 KHz crystal I also have 5 of those.) I lost my completed kits when I moved out; my favorite was the shortwave radio. I added an external audio amp and vernier tuning cap to mine and it was amazing the stations I could pull in with it. Anyway, I've got a drawer full of those NE2 bulbs (I think I got them from Poly Paks, remember THEM?) and I've been thinking about grabbing the online PBox docs for that neon light flasher and duplicating it. Maybe with an ExpressPCB circuit board this time. Some things have improved...
That said, I also began reading, and couldn't wait for the next edition of Circuit Cellar to show up in my mailbox. If I remember correctly, Parallax began advertising their Basic Stamp in the early '90s on the inside of the front cover. I've been a customer and have been having FUN with Parallax stuff ever since.
Them OMRON things were quite expensive, around $20.000 each.
We decided to build a cash register out of 268 PCs booting from Novell 3.12(?) images.
To attach a scale we needed some conversion Chip and I stumbled over a new product.
"Die Basic-Briefmarke" (Basic-Stamp). Sold by a company in Bonn, Germany (pullmoll?).
It worked and everybody was happy. That was about 1991.
I moved on in my live as programmer and rarely see any COBOL code anymore.
Even if MOST (by lines of source) of the source-code in this world is still in COBOL.
(For people not knowing COBOL sources - it is the most verbose language I know of. No comments needed at all)
Fast Forward.
About 2 years ago I stumbled over a handbook of that cash register we build 1992. I found it here at my mums place in California. And I googled Basic Stamp. (BIG MISTAKE)
And then I got hooked. First by the forum and then by the propeller.
Like a lot of us I started programming at a time where you were able to understand/grasp/grook the whole system. Say Altair?,Wang 2000, TRS80, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair, whatever.
Later on I got used to those layers of layers of layers protecting me from the hardware. I still work as a programmer but the FUN is gone.
And PARALLAX gave all of that FUN back to me. In opposite to ANY other mc you have full control over the hardware if you want.
Just your code. Nothing else runs. No need for datasheets for using I2C,UART,SPI, whatever on this or that pin and live with it or don't do it.
It's all yours. You can use stuff from other people but you don't need to. You can bitbang whatever you want with your own code...
If you don't build it, you don't really own it.
The next mistake I made was that I went to PARALLAX by person. Visiting my first PARLLAX Conference.
Now I am doomed forever. I am REALLY impressed by the way the company is working and how/why they do it.
Enjoy!
Mike
Since I was like 9, I wanted to build robots, but folks told me they were too complex and expensive. When I graduated with a CS degree, my first job was using FORTH. It seemed perfect, but the "official" version of forth was still too expensive, and FORTH could not reach its potential until a multi-core system was available. I gave up, and switched to the BASIC stamp, which was fine but made me claustrophobic. I heard about the prop, and when I read about Cliffe Biffle's Propeller forth, I got a demo board. I never got propellerforth to run, but I was able to contact Sal Sanci. I told him my sketchy plan to teach kids about robots using forth. He said "that's interesting enough." If I would do my quality and process thing for propforth, he would do "what ever" to help my efforts. How about that? As a result, the package is much more refined than a personal tool would be.
Now I'm finally beginning to introduce kids to making their own bots from scratch, using a "better than pro" real time development embedded environment, for the lowest possible cost. The thought being that only about 10% of folks are cut out to be engineers, so it has to be low risk so we can give the opportunity to everyone, and reach the entire 10%.
So I guess my project took 40 years to prepare for the arrival of the hardware, and five years to get moving.
I first found out about Parallax in my university microprocessor course. My professor loved Parallax and was looking for an opportunity to learn the Propeller. He figured that there wouldn't be a better way to learn than to teach it. We were coming off of PIC programming, so the Propeller was a wonderfully refreshing change.
Chip also was kind enough to give our class a virtual tour of Parallax using his laptop webcam. During the tour, I couldn't help but think that Parallax looked like a really cool place to work. And, as luck would have it, they were hiring in their education department. I applied immediately and the rest, as they say, was history.
Jump forward a few years, and while working in my radioshack store I see the Basic Stamp What is a Microcontroller, and I had to have one.
Fastforward again, and I ended up in the Propeller world with a side trip through SX land.
Jim
Just after, I was in an electronics shop the other side of town and saw the Boe-Bot (amongst other kits). I purchased it to see what it might be like and that led here.
.... C
Jessica, you're a breath of fresh air in here. So much so, that we old guys with decades of Parallax history to recount won't assume that your comment was in any way flaunting your youth.
The next sampling of parallax products was with the SX. The speed and low cost roped me in, but SXB wasn't out yet and I just couldn't get my brain around how minutely SX asm required a problem to be divided. (only having conditional skips didn't help either...)
The Propeller was what finally hooked me about 5 years ago. An 8 core 32-bit microprocessor designed and documented by Parallax? Yes please!
Lawson
HA! Glad to hear it.
Though really I'm just in awe, slightly jealous, and a little intimidated by everyone's vast knowledge and experience! I dub thee all 'radtastic'. :P
Some of us are just old. :frown:
+1
What a diplomat!
And that led here!
I bought a parallel processing system... based on ADA... and hired a guy to explain it to me... not good.
Then I found Forest Mims... it all seemed to be within reach, except I couldn't figure out how to generate -12V. Then I just started buying stuff. And no matter what I bought, I didn't have enough time to actually make it work.
Fast forward 10 years: Google arrives. I find a reference to something called a "Propeller," a processor that doesn't have to stop doing one thing in order to start doing something else. So, it seems like it might have enough
utility to justify serious study... and it didn't require me to figure out -12V. I get a couple of boards... and they actually work without me doing anything except plugging them in. Heaven.
Cheers,
Jesse
Thanks for your story, it sure rung a bell here!
Fast forward to a few years ago and I was in the soldering training program at Lockheed Martin thinking I might get into this electronics hobby if I get the job.
Washed out in the training program, didn't get the job but did pick up a new hobby.