I have nothing to lament over. In fact, I was relieved over the P2 reboot. I've been inactive on the forum for quite some time now, but I'd poke my head in every several months just to find to my horror the amount of complexity the P2 was accruing. Realistically speaking, despite the potentially good performance it could achieve (through the use of all sorts of trickery), the design was still hindered by the fundamental architecture choices, which made grossly inefficient. IMO, this new design is shaping up to be a more fitting successor to the original Propeller, which is a wonderful thing. It has more of everything; cogs, memory, speed, pins, and a bunch of other goodies, while still maintaining the overall simplicity of the P1. I was so overwhelmed by the previous iteration of the P2, I was doubting whether I'd ever even figure out how to blink a led with it. It just didn't seem like a microcontroller anymore, so I might as well have gone with a 1GHz+ application processor running some OS and called it a day.
It's funny that, all those years back when Chip asked whether we wanted him to work on a 64 I/O P1, or the all new P2, the first thing I pondered over was the hub bandwidth issue, and my initial "solution" was what we're getting now, but I passed it off as being a terrible idea overall for the various reasons which have been mentioned the past several days. So I wasn't particularly pleased when Chip announced that was the route he was going, but his brilliant 16-long immediate transfer scheme sold me on it. I still have my reservations about it, but much of it can be addressed quite simply. Overall, though, it's a much better solution than the simple single window round robin approach IMO.
As for the cog memory thing, I haven't run into issue with it in my admittedly limited PASM programming. In fact, if it had significantly more, I would have felt terrible about wasting it. If there was more cog ram, I'd hope there was also tasks.
I can't begin to imagine the topological complexity of simulating a rotating memory on silicon that doesn't actually move! ... Hmmm ... I wonder if he's considered a MEMS implementation?
Given how aggressive the other engine was, I think poking fun at me for doing video related things is unwarranted overall. And everybody thought it was possible in the process too. Can't forget that.
Haven't read the rest of this thread, however absolutely not trying to poke fun, or anything like that.
You're a video guy, and this change is fantastic for you as I said. Not making that an issue so much as noting that some of your expressed desires seemed to have fallen by the wayside as a result.
Now that others are expressing some of those fallen desires, you are sort of in the opposite position of arguing that they do not matter now. I didn't post in 48 pt font, however it was almost as exasperating after still not having seen all the purported downfalls of sharing that were being flung around.
May I remind you AGAIN, of that poll? It's near 3:1 against "normal cores" on that other thread, so you can fixate on me if you want to, but it's not very productive. That one is just not in the majority at present.
Honestly, not 'fixating' on you specifically.
You happen to wax enthusiastically about how great this is almost every time someone has what appears to be a valid concern.
As for the poll, its 21/9, somewhere close to 50/50 then.
So, out of the hundreds of people who are on the forum, 29 bothered to vote. If anything, I'd say that suggests general fatigue and low morale, especially when you consider the previous poll was 48/4...
As for the HUB scheme, now that I've clarified my core arguments, along with other worthy ones out there, and how that scheme tends to mesh with them, it's time to let the FPGA get done and we write some code and check it out.
Until then, no amount of thrashing around will resolve anything. Have an open mind. We may well find this is excellent!
---says, "spud" that crazy video guy. lol
I have to agree, no amount of discussion appears to be able to change the current plan.
Maybe thats why so few people have bothered to vote.
Hopefully the number of 'gotchas' that will emerge are minimal, die size (power/cost/heat), tapeout/timeline, software/tools adaption, and is ultimately seen as worth the time by the revenue customers.
Honestly, not 'fixating' on you specifically.
You happen to wax enthusiastically about how great this is almost every time someone has what appears to be a valid concern.
No worries, I took it wrong.
Not making that an issue so much as noting that some of your expressed desires seemed to have fallen by the wayside as a result.
Actually, I made a long post that detailed the core dynamic, and yes some did fall by the wayside. The core ones I value most didn't. When we get the FPGA, there will be more clarity on that.
I also, in that post, put the strongest counter arguments right out there, and recognized their strength too.
You happen to wax enthusiastically about how great this
I believe my words were: "nobody got everything they wanted", and "We may find this excellent", and "Let's get the FPGA and give it a go."
Or something to that effect. Close enough.
I have to agree, no amount of discussion appears to be able to change the current plan.
Yeah. Chip asked for dialog, then did what he thought made the most sense. Is this a surprise somehow?
Hopefully the number of 'gotchas' that will emerge are minimal, die size (power/cost/heat), tapeout/timeline, software/tools adaption, and is ultimately seen as worth the time by the revenue customers.
...May I remind you AGAIN, of that poll? It's near 3:1 against "normal cores" on that other thread, so you can fixate on me if you want to, but it's not very productive. That one is just not in the majority at present....
I am very close to giving up, sticking my dev kits on eBay and moving on.
...
The very harsh reality is that I, along with everyone else, is spoilt for choice in the 32-bit uC market.
Waking up to another Groundhog Day is too tiring so it's time for me to move on.
It's clear to me that this new chip is heading the way of the P2 as more and more 'features' get added on. Key requirements, driven by customer demand, seem secondary to things that are 'cool' and 'neat'. Feature creep, justified by claims that 'it's only a few gates' or even worse 'if we can do it we'd be daft not to', continues apace.
So, this morning, I've finalised my choice and bought some dev kits which'll be with me tomorrow.
Waking up to another Groundhog Day is too tiring so it's time for me to move on.
It's clear to me that this new chip is heading the way of the P2 as more and more 'features' get added on. Key requirements, driven by customer demand, seem secondary to things that are 'cool' and 'neat'. Feature creep, justified by claims that 'it's only a few gates' or even worse 'if we can do it we'd be daft not to', continues apace.
So, this morning, I've finalised my choice and bought some dev kits which'll be with me tomorrow.
I understand how you feel, Brian. It is very disspiriting watching what's going on. But I still have faith in Chip. No-one who could design the beautifully simple and elegant P1 architecture could possibly fall into the same trap of favoring complexity over elegance twice!
Waking up to another Groundhog Day is too tiring so it's time for me to move on.
It's clear to me that this new chip is heading the way of the P2 as more and more 'features' get added on. Key requirements, driven by customer demand, seem secondary to things that are 'cool' and 'neat'. Feature creep, justified by claims that 'it's only a few gates' or even worse 'if we can do it we'd be daft not to', continues apace.
So, this morning, I've finalised my choice and bought some dev kits which'll be with me tomorrow.
Been there done that for some time but I haven't fulfilled my list of good deeds to be released yet, i still have to do a heimlich maneuver and a tire to fix etc. Yes, It is very tiring although some never seem to tire of proposing something new or advocating their way of doing it when all the indicators are that unless P2 materializes it may end up losing much of it's commercial following. I'm still busy designing and using P1 so I haven't had the time to join in that much but it makes me wonder whether most of those with input over these years get all this time from, have they any real commercial interest, it seems they want to build a better emulator or maybe it's just academic interest. Even just the smaller P1 stuff that I have manufactured directly out of my workshop has probably been in the thousands but I have Props buried in scores of other commercial designs. But I don't think Parallax cares as to what guys like us need, I needed it last year, this hub stuff is okay but not worth another delay, and now the FIFOs, and ... there goes the alarm, it's 6 o'clock again.... Yes, the new ARMs are looking decidedly attractive indeed but other than a dev kit that new one is unavailable too!
I have a Parallela board that I got a few weeks ago but I haven't tried powering it up. It came with a heat sink for the Zynq chip and also said I should use a fan. That dampened my enthusiasm a bit.
I've worked through all the stages of grieving for the loss of the P2HOT (and yes, buying a DE2 1 week before the plug was pulled and re-re-re-design started).
I certainly have the tools to sit down and learn some Verilog and VHDL on my collection of FPGAs.
...and then there is the P1 emulation on the BeMicro that I almost forgot about completely.
I've got Bill Henning's RoboPi projects going on (with proper Python code, as it should be) and of course assorted Raspberry Pi distractions.
And OBC got me hooked on the MicroMite project - a 32 bit PIC running an enhanced Basic(very cool and very well done). Jeff is busy hooking it up with his PMC over on his forum and is having a lot of success and a lot of fun (the reasons I do this stuff in the first place).
Certainly enough to keep be busy, productive and happy until we get some sort of P2 emulation to play with.
Plus, I get distracted easily, so I'm sure there will be other bright, shiny objects to fill my idle time!
The time for lament is over, it's time to move on with our lives! There is life after P2HOT...and P1+ and P16 and P2 and P2(redux)...sometimes life just doesn't have P in it!
I have a Parallela board that I got a few weeks ago but I haven't tried powering it up. It came with a heat sink for the Zynq chip and also said I should use a fan. That dampened my enthusiasm a bit.
No excess wattage problems there!! THat did kind of concern me about the Parallela demos - there always seemed to be a (largish) fan prominently involved.
That's an impressive list of 'stuff' there Heater. I had a similarly long list until a few months ago when I moved a lot of it on via eBay. Although, if I dig around, I suspect I've still got far too much.
My obvious route would have been to go ARM, probably STM32, having used a few devices here and there, but I've decided to go PIC32 for all uC needs other than 8 and 20-pin devices where I'll stick with AVRs. The reason is that PIC32 seems to have more flexible peripherals. Take SPI, most SPI modules are 8-bit, some are 9-bit (!) and some are 16-bit. PIC32 SPI modules are 32-bit with all sorts of interesting modes. So I've got an assortment of boards and headers and modules coming from Farnell.
And how am I supposed to connect to the GPIO on those weeny connectors on the bottom?
I'm seeing the hybrid of something ARM and a P1 intelligent I/O controller as being the future. In playing with the RasPi, there are issues (as expected) with consistent timing using the GPIO, even with the RoboPi as it is now, there are timing issues with issuing a command from the Pi to turn on and then turn off an LED (blink-sleep-blink running on the Pi, does not give you a consistent blink rate) ...but when the RoboPi becomes a smart peripheral that you can just issue a "blink" command to for example and let it run on the Propeller until intervention is required then you have the smart I/O you need to do the micro controller thing. The thing is, for now, this doesn't require a P2, the P1 should do just fine as a async/I2C/SPI smart peripheral. You can attach any kind of processing power behind the Propeller as long as it talks one of those protocols. Nothing is in concrete but the things I've done over the past couple weeks are pretty cool (for me at least)...I'm sold on this path forward.
I have a Parallella board but I haven't tried powering it up yet. It came with a heatsink that needs to be attached to the Zynq chip and also instructions to only use it with a fan. That dampened my enthusiasm a bit.
...it makes me wonder whether most of those with input over these years get all this time from, have they any real commercial interest, it seems they want to build a better emulator or maybe it's just academic interest.
I always have half an eye on any opportunity to apply Propellers in my work. Sadly nothing has come up, we always seem to need a lot more processing power and networking etc etc and end up with an ARM.
Yep, I also want to build a better Z80 emulator:)
And yep, it's a lot academic.
@Brian,
Ah yes. The PIC32. That has been calling to me as well.
After seeing the Rick's RoboPi in action (by way of a remote camera and internet control connection) I'm looking forward to Karl's new design that we are waiting to get back from PCB fab.
I've deleted all of my negative posts from the P2 forums, and still lurk this section at least once or twice a week, but I'm not letting the grass grow under my feet.
I've been redesigning the PMC project -minus Femto and having a blast doing it. The whole point of the microcontroller hobby for me is learning and de-stressing. (It's cheaper than therapy!) If at the end of the day, I happen to be able to sell a few kits on the Propellerpowered site, then it justifies the craziness to the spouse.
I loath Ubuntu. I don't understand why it exists. All they do is take Debian and break it in interesting ways. And it's a horrible moving target. And I almost never use X on these little ARM boards. And that Linaro Ubuntu is what comes as default for the IGEP ARM boards we use for work projects, it's horrible, immediately gets replaced with my hand rolled Debian SD cards. And Canonical seems to be very poor at contributing back to the Linux kernel. And did I say Ubuntu is horrible?
Luckily I just found that some chap produced a Debian Wheezy SD for the Parallella back in February.
After seeing the Rick's RoboPi in action (by way of a remote camera and internet control connection) I'm looking forward to Karl's new design that we are waiting to get back from PCB fab.
I've deleted all of my negative posts from the P2 forums, and still lurk this section at least once or twice a week, but I'm not letting the grass grow under my feet.
I've been redesigning the PMC project -minus Femto and having a blast doing it. The whole point of the microcontroller hobby for me is learning and de-stressing. (It's cheaper than therapy!) If at the end of the day, I happen to be able to sell a few kits on the Propellerpowered site, then it justifies the craziness to the spouse.
uMiteBASIC is probably badly named.. In short, it's a type of terminal interface between the Propeller and the uMite chip that allows it to control the more interesting parts of the video object.
This will start you down the path to uMite. It's a versions of MMBasic which appears to trace its roots back to Microsoft Basics of the 80's. It's been enhanced to support the PIC32 with all kinds of micro-controller goodness. I was going to go on with some details but that's not fair to our hosts.
This has been a long development. I'm eager to see this design completed. I too trust Chip. Everybody wants and needs it to go forward at this point and he knows that.
During the time, I've done various P1 projects, spent some time doing retro computing related things, helped mentor a student, changed jobs --which I am doing again right now. Good change. And in general, didn't get stuck on this.
There are a few things I want to do with this chip. Itching to do that. Hoping I get to do that.
I also picked up both of the TI discovery kits they offered for a few bucks. Getting setup for those was a little adventure. Haven't done much yet. Didn't need to. Not sure I want to.
If you go off and get some new toys, just make sure you are having fun and or doing something you need to get done. Doing it as a protest isn't likely to be all that productive. Try to feel good about your fun time Brian. Everybody wants that.
uMiteBASIC is probably badly named.. In short, it's a type of terminal interface between the Propeller and the uMite chip that allows it to control the more interesting parts of the video object.
Jeff
Okay, I see now. MicroMite is a separate chip that runs a Basic interpreter. I think I mentioned to you at one point that I have a faster Basic that runs on the Propeller called ebasic3. It compiles to bytecodes which are executed by a PASM VM. It's pretty fast and will run on any Propeller board with a 64K EEPROM.
If you go off and get some new toys, just make sure you are having fun and or doing something you need to get done. Doing it as a protest isn't likely to be all that productive. Try to feel good about your fun time Brian. Everybody wants that.
+1 this comment.. Just check back in from time to time and see if it's time to add a Propeller 2 to your collection..
Okay, I see now. MicroMite is a separate chip that runs a Basic interpreter. I think I mentioned to you at one point that I have a faster Basic that runs on the Propeller called ebasic3. It compiles to bytecodes which are executed by a PASM VM. It's pretty fast and will run on any Propeller board with a 64K EEPROM.
I went this way because the mmBASIC is already VERY complete. All of the functionality I never had room for is already onboard plus a lot more. Strings, DATA/READ, etc. Combining this with the power of the Propeller will allow me to have my cake and eat it too.
I went this way because the mmBASIC is already VERY complete. All of the functionality I never had room for is already onboard plus a lot more. Strings, DATA/READ, etc. Combining this with the power of the Propeller will allow me to have my cake and eat it too.
Jeff
I understand. Actually, this is why I (and others too) encouraged Chip to consider adding an ARM core to the P2 to serve as an "application processor". If the source code for MicroMite is available it would be interesting to compile it to run on the Propeller.
Edit: I looked over the MicroMite documentation a bit and it looks like they implemented fixed-maximum length strings where each string variable is always allocated 256 bytes of storage. I could easily add that to ebasic3. Fully dynamic strings are a bit more complex.
If you go off and get some new toys, just make sure you are having fun and or doing something you need to get done. Doing it as a protest isn't likely to be all that productive. Try to feel good about your fun time Brian. Everybody wants that.
Thanks and good advice. It'd be a pretty pointless protest anyway. This is something that needs to get done; I've got a couple of designs to do that'll be so much easier in a 32-bit processor.
I've just remembered, I've got a maximite, or the Olimex version of it, sitting in a drawer somewhere. I might fire it up later for a bit of retro fun.
Comments
It's funny that, all those years back when Chip asked whether we wanted him to work on a 64 I/O P1, or the all new P2, the first thing I pondered over was the hub bandwidth issue, and my initial "solution" was what we're getting now, but I passed it off as being a terrible idea overall for the various reasons which have been mentioned the past several days. So I wasn't particularly pleased when Chip announced that was the route he was going, but his brilliant 16-long immediate transfer scheme sold me on it. I still have my reservations about it, but much of it can be addressed quite simply. Overall, though, it's a much better solution than the simple single window round robin approach IMO.
As for the cog memory thing, I haven't run into issue with it in my admittedly limited PASM programming. In fact, if it had significantly more, I would have felt terrible about wasting it. If there was more cog ram, I'd hope there was also tasks.
Haven't read the rest of this thread, however absolutely not trying to poke fun, or anything like that.
You're a video guy, and this change is fantastic for you as I said. Not making that an issue so much as noting that some of your expressed desires seemed to have fallen by the wayside as a result.
Now that others are expressing some of those fallen desires, you are sort of in the opposite position of arguing that they do not matter now. I didn't post in 48 pt font, however it was almost as exasperating after still not having seen all the purported downfalls of sharing that were being flung around.
Honestly, not 'fixating' on you specifically.
You happen to wax enthusiastically about how great this is almost every time someone has what appears to be a valid concern.
As for the poll, its 21/9, somewhere close to 50/50 then.
So, out of the hundreds of people who are on the forum, 29 bothered to vote. If anything, I'd say that suggests general fatigue and low morale, especially when you consider the previous poll was 48/4...
I have to agree, no amount of discussion appears to be able to change the current plan.
Maybe thats why so few people have bothered to vote.
Hopefully the number of 'gotchas' that will emerge are minimal, die size (power/cost/heat), tapeout/timeline, software/tools adaption, and is ultimately seen as worth the time by the revenue customers.
No worries, I took it wrong.
Actually, I made a long post that detailed the core dynamic, and yes some did fall by the wayside. The core ones I value most didn't. When we get the FPGA, there will be more clarity on that.
I also, in that post, put the strongest counter arguments right out there, and recognized their strength too.
I believe my words were: "nobody got everything they wanted", and "We may find this excellent", and "Let's get the FPGA and give it a go."
Or something to that effect. Close enough.
Yeah. Chip asked for dialog, then did what he thought made the most sense. Is this a surprise somehow?
Indeed.
quite un-precise for programmers.
21/9 would be about 2:1 neither 3:1 nor 50/50
Enjoy!
Mike
Waking up to another Groundhog Day is too tiring so it's time for me to move on.
It's clear to me that this new chip is heading the way of the P2 as more and more 'features' get added on. Key requirements, driven by customer demand, seem secondary to things that are 'cool' and 'neat'. Feature creep, justified by claims that 'it's only a few gates' or even worse 'if we can do it we'd be daft not to', continues apace.
So, this morning, I've finalised my choice and bought some dev kits which'll be with me tomorrow.
I understand how you feel, Brian. It is very disspiriting watching what's going on. But I still have faith in Chip. No-one who could design the beautifully simple and elegant P1 architecture could possibly fall into the same trap of favoring complexity over elegance twice!
Ross.
I understand how you feel as well Brian. This Groundhog day thing is really frustrating
Great, what goodies are you getting?
In case of emergencies I have here:
Two XMOS devboards. A 4 core, 32 hardware scheduled threads, 256KRAM device on one. The other is single core, 8 threads, 64K RAM.http://www.xmos.com/
A mess of ARM boards, one of my favourites is the IGEP: https://www.isee.biz/store/product/76-igepv2-dm3730
A couple of RaspberryPis. http://www.raspberrypi.org/. Really looking forward to this version: http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-compute-module-new-product/
A DE0-nano FPGA Board. It's been waiting for Groundhog Day to end but I think I have to start learning some VHDL on it. https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=593
Two Espruino boards. STM32 ARMs running the Espruino JavaScript interpreter. With wireless modules.
http://www.espruino.com/
STM32F4 Discovery board. http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM116/SC959/SS1532/PF252419
An N8VM Z80 board. Thanks Dr_Acula.
Some other old junk. AVRs, PICs.
Oh, I just picked up two Mororola 68000 chips! They were on offer in our local electronics supply store, 1 Euro each. How could I resist?
And ta-da!, yesterday my Parallella board arrived with it's dual core ARM and 16 floating point core Epiphany accelerator!
Oh, and a tube of Propellers that make good I/O expanders for the above.
There are so many options in the MCU world now a days it's mind boggling.
Been there done that for some time but I haven't fulfilled my list of good deeds to be released yet, i still have to do a heimlich maneuver and a tire to fix etc. Yes, It is very tiring although some never seem to tire of proposing something new or advocating their way of doing it when all the indicators are that unless P2 materializes it may end up losing much of it's commercial following. I'm still busy designing and using P1 so I haven't had the time to join in that much but it makes me wonder whether most of those with input over these years get all this time from, have they any real commercial interest, it seems they want to build a better emulator or maybe it's just academic interest. Even just the smaller P1 stuff that I have manufactured directly out of my workshop has probably been in the thousands but I have Props buried in scores of other commercial designs. But I don't think Parallax cares as to what guys like us need, I needed it last year, this hub stuff is okay but not worth another delay, and now the FIFOs, and ... there goes the alarm, it's 6 o'clock again.... Yes, the new ARMs are looking decidedly attractive indeed but other than a dev kit that new one is unavailable too!
I certainly have the tools to sit down and learn some Verilog and VHDL on my collection of FPGAs.
...and then there is the P1 emulation on the BeMicro that I almost forgot about completely.
I've got Bill Henning's RoboPi projects going on (with proper Python code, as it should be) and of course assorted Raspberry Pi distractions.
And OBC got me hooked on the MicroMite project - a 32 bit PIC running an enhanced Basic(very cool and very well done). Jeff is busy hooking it up with his PMC over on his forum and is having a lot of success and a lot of fun (the reasons I do this stuff in the first place).
Certainly enough to keep be busy, productive and happy until we get some sort of P2 emulation to play with.
Plus, I get distracted easily, so I'm sure there will be other bright, shiny objects to fill my idle time!
The time for lament is over, it's time to move on with our lives! There is life after P2HOT...and P1+ and P16 and P2 and P2(redux)...sometimes life just doesn't have P in it!
No excess wattage problems there!!
That's an impressive list of 'stuff' there Heater. I had a similarly long list until a few months ago when I moved a lot of it on via eBay. Although, if I dig around, I suspect I've still got far too much.
My obvious route would have been to go ARM, probably STM32, having used a few devices here and there, but I've decided to go PIC32 for all uC needs other than 8 and 20-pin devices where I'll stick with AVRs. The reason is that PIC32 seems to have more flexible peripherals. Take SPI, most SPI modules are 8-bit, some are 9-bit (!) and some are 16-bit. PIC32 SPI modules are 32-bit with all sorts of interesting modes. So I've got an assortment of boards and headers and modules coming from Farnell.
I'm seeing the hybrid of something ARM and a P1 intelligent I/O controller as being the future. In playing with the RasPi, there are issues (as expected) with consistent timing using the GPIO, even with the RoboPi as it is now, there are timing issues with issuing a command from the Pi to turn on and then turn off an LED (blink-sleep-blink running on the Pi, does not give you a consistent blink rate) ...but when the RoboPi becomes a smart peripheral that you can just issue a "blink" command to for example and let it run on the Propeller until intervention is required then you have the smart I/O you need to do the micro controller thing. The thing is, for now, this doesn't require a P2, the P1 should do just fine as a async/I2C/SPI smart peripheral. You can attach any kind of processing power behind the Propeller as long as it talks one of those protocols. Nothing is in concrete but the things I've done over the past couple weeks are pretty cool (for me at least)...I'm sold on this path forward.
Yep, I also want to build a better Z80 emulator:)
And yep, it's a lot academic.
@Brian,
Ah yes. The PIC32. That has been calling to me as well.
I've deleted all of my negative posts from the P2 forums, and still lurk this section at least once or twice a week, but I'm not letting the grass grow under my feet.
I've been redesigning the PMC project -minus Femto and having a blast doing it. The whole point of the microcontroller hobby for me is learning and de-stressing. (It's cheaper than therapy!) If at the end of the day, I happen to be able to sell a few kits on the Propellerpowered site, then it justifies the craziness to the spouse.
Jeff
Luckily I just found that some chap produced a Debian Wheezy SD for the Parallella back in February.
uMiteBASIC is probably badly named.. In short, it's a type of terminal interface between the Propeller and the uMite chip that allows it to control the more interesting parts of the video object.
Jeff
This will start you down the path to uMite. It's a versions of MMBasic which appears to trace its roots back to Microsoft Basics of the 80's. It's been enhanced to support the PIC32 with all kinds of micro-controller goodness. I was going to go on with some details but that's not fair to our hosts.
During the time, I've done various P1 projects, spent some time doing retro computing related things, helped mentor a student, changed jobs --which I am doing again right now. Good change. And in general, didn't get stuck on this.
There are a few things I want to do with this chip. Itching to do that. Hoping I get to do that.
I also picked up both of the TI discovery kits they offered for a few bucks. Getting setup for those was a little adventure. Haven't done much yet. Didn't need to. Not sure I want to.
If you go off and get some new toys, just make sure you are having fun and or doing something you need to get done. Doing it as a protest isn't likely to be all that productive. Try to feel good about your fun time Brian. Everybody wants that.
+1 this comment.. Just check back in from time to time and see if it's time to add a Propeller 2 to your collection..
Jeff
I went this way because the mmBASIC is already VERY complete. All of the functionality I never had room for is already onboard plus a lot more. Strings, DATA/READ, etc. Combining this with the power of the Propeller will allow me to have my cake and eat it too.
Jeff
Edit: I looked over the MicroMite documentation a bit and it looks like they implemented fixed-maximum length strings where each string variable is always allocated 256 bytes of storage. I could easily add that to ebasic3. Fully dynamic strings are a bit more complex.
Thanks and good advice. It'd be a pretty pointless protest anyway. This is something that needs to get done; I've got a couple of designs to do that'll be so much easier in a 32-bit processor.
I shall.
I've just remembered, I've got a maximite, or the Olimex version of it, sitting in a drawer somewhere. I might fire it up later for a bit of retro fun.