just some chatter about can other micro contrllers do several things at once

whiteoxe

if you havev some micro controllers connected exchanging info over a serial connectionl lets say eight of them. could they be timed to do a different task at exactly the same time ?

And what about a pc running C#, THAT COULD BE PROGRAMMEDV TO DO many things at the same millisecond ?

Why isbthe basic stamp more expensive than an arduino and why didnt it explode onto the market like the arduino ?

Why am i going to use the arduino as te brains of my first robot rather than the basic stamp board im playing aroubd with or one of he picaxe chips i have in their box ?

i'll answer the last one, its probly cause the arduino was marketed to everyone, even dancers and artists,, and i program like a dancer Actually i hope i keep up the SimpleIde lessons, i feel a lot more satisfaction if i made my robot a propellor

Mike Green

Yes, you can network several microcontrollers (including Basic Stamps) to do multiprocessing (each doing something at "the same time"). Multiple PCs can also be networked together to each do a task (same or different) at essentially the same time. Remember that most modern PCs use multi-core processors that really have several separate "cores" like the Propeller's cogs.

The Basic Stamp is more expensive than an Arduino for a number of reasons. In most cases, the Stamp is furnished on a 24-pin module which costs more to manufacture than most Arduino boards. In addition, Parallax is still paying off the investment in development for the Stamps.

Remember that the Stamps were developed many years before the Arduino was developed. The Arduino was also developed in an educational environment where some of the development costs were subsidized by the universities involved and it was done as open-source. The Stamps very much predated open-source and were developed privately.

The Basic Stamps are simple and reliable to use and, most importantly, have excellent support and a lot of educational material, sample code, magazine articles, etc. already available.

Technically, the Propeller is a much better processor for a lot of things, but doesn't have the volume of support material available like the Stamps do. The Arduino is also simple to use and has a huge amount of support material, magazine articles, sample projects and code, etc. The Propeller, because of the multiple cogs (cores), is more flexible and powerful than the Arduino. You have to pick the best platform for your needs. That may be determined mostly by performance, flexibility, support, or a combination.

whiteoxe

mike, ive read many of your posts and you ave helped me before. I wouldn;t hold a candle to you if we had a debate (that just struck me as a weird expression and i dont know what it once meant but without your insight, your response about the basic stamp 'feels' like simply a convienient answer. I ve only been interested in microcontrollers forv about 7 or 8 years and it was picaxe i ordered, whle during the day i built fences, mustered cattle and planted crops. I got it because i had always playedwith computers srarting with am ibm that had va yellow or orange font that ran dos. i ordered the picaxe to challene myself, i didnt believe when i got the microchip i would be even half smart enough to do anything with it but the 08 was dirt cheap and i had a lot of satisfaction getting the hang of it. ) got more satisfaction from some simple projects with that computer chip than i did building cattle yards or fences. but maybe sadly i did a lot more of fences and things than ever with a picaxe.

LoopyByteloose

There is a lot of history to the BasicStamp. It came on to the market at a time when devices like the Arduino were not yet available and at a time when only Parallax was offering a free programing language with a free IDE. Most people that were doing things cheaply were programing only in assembler and maybe writing their own assember if they could.

At that time, you could buy PICs for $2 or $3 USD, but to program in Basic you had to pay another $300USD or more for development software. And in many cases, it just wasn't as good as what Parallax had to offer.

So $50 for a BasicStamp2 and all the software was the best deal around.

It is a competitive market place and competitors have changed their approaches and developed strategies to take away BasicStamp market share -- some succeed, others are junk.

Making it so tiny and installing those 24 pins is expensive on the board's edges. The Arduino escapes these costs by being larger and doing just about everything to minimize construction costs.

Parallax remains competitive by providing the Propeller and -- hopefully soon -- the Propeller 2.

If you don't fully appreciate the history of what the BasicStamp was in the 1990s and early years of the new millennium, it may never make sense.

Parallax has always made the BasicStamp in California, USA and under their own roof. That is the only way they could prove that illegal copies were in volation of their ownership. So that has added to production cost.

With the Propeller, boards can be made anywhere. The chip is what it is and ownership isn't in doubt. Fakes are nearly impossible and uneconomical.

+++++++++
This is a bit like trying to compare what peopel paid for an Apple][ against a Raspberry Pi. Different times and different choices.

The BasicStamps remain in production just because they still offer value to many people that have learned to use them. That's all they want and they continue to buy.

whiteoxe

i for one thought it was a strange ]name as a new comer; the basic wwwhattt???? Stamp.... not cool. i kept thinking of old envelopes an old stamps.... but the picaxe, something rang a chord with in, and it was sooo simple and technological all at once. a bare computer chip that i as a humble average joe could control and make it do things, i felt like i was waling in the shadow of jobs and that other guy, Bill. The story would make interesting reading i think ! i still think there is somethin col about thr little o8 .

ive seen a few versions of sotware "basic" so all kinds of chips could be programmedijn basic. though it sounded mad paying hundreds for that!!! i hope C for the prop helps it take off !!!

Heater.

whiteox,

if you have some micro controllers connected exchanging info over a serial connectionl lets say eight of them. could they be timed to do a different task at exactly the same time ?

Sure why not? If you want really accurate synchronization why not run a wire from chip to chip and use changes on that to trigger the actions? Depends what you want to do.

And what about a pc running C#, THAT COULD BE PROGRAMMEDV TO DO many things at the same millisecond ?

Of course. Especially if you have a multi-core processor. However getting tight timing on a OS such as Windows or Linux that are not designed for real time work may be tricky. A millisecond might be OK.

Why isbthe basic stamp more expensive than an arduino and why didnt it explode onto the market like the arduino ?

Low volumes. Made in America. Closed source design...

...and why didnt it explode onto the market like the arduino ?

I knew nothing about it, despite working with and around micro-controllers since the stone age, but I suspect for it's time it did.

Seems to me that during the PC era electronics as a hobby was almost totally dead. Interesting components were getting impossibly small. Having PCB's made was expensive. People were all tied up with their video games. There was no pressing need to make stuff, like back in the day when people built radios or later even televisions and so on. Pretty much anything was cheaper to buy than build.

In recent years the Arduino then the Raspberry Pi have "exploded". The Maker and Hacker Space movements have taken off. All fuelled by the availability of cheap PCB's from SparkFun, AdaFruit, etc, by the internet, by the interest in robotics, by the availability of all kinds of cheap and interesting sensors.

It's a different world all of a sudden.

Why am i going to use the arduino as te brains of my first robot rather than the basic stamp board im playing aroubd with or one of he picaxe chips i have in their box ?

Why indeed? If that is the case why are you asking all these questions on a Parallax forum.

The real question here is why are you going to use an Arduino for your robot when a Propeller would probably be a better option?

...though it sounded mad paying hundreds for that [ BASIC ] !!!

It was mad paying so much for Bill's crappy BASIC. Looking at it today you wonder how that ever happened. There are hundreds of BASICs out there. There is a whole bunch of them for the Propeller. People seem to knock up a quick BASIC interpreter over the weekend.

But Bill was smart, he knew all this. When the Altair computer came out he knew people would soon be doing all this and that he had to get his BASIC out first to succeed.

Meanwhile he had a captive market already. All those Altair buyers soon found out that their machines were useless junk unless you had a huge amount of time to invest in developing any code for it. Paying Bill was their way of salvaging their investment.

LoopyByteloose

The name, BasicStamp referred to the simple fact that a whole board (some thought of it as a motherboard of sorts) could be sold in the size of a postage stamp. It seemed to grab people's attention, like claims of credit card sized computers do these days.

But the real problem is that when you cut printer circuit board into such tiny sizes, it is harder for mass production machinery to hold on the the boards. Production runs much more smoothly from start to finish if you a board that is roughly 2 by 3 inches or larger. Less jams, easier to keep the flow going. Making devices one larger boards and cutting them up is equally a problem. And then there are those pesky 24 pins that made it so bread-board friendly.

Much of the computer market place has been sales driven on suddenly being able to have what you could never have before. That seems to the reoccurring theme behind all the successful products. Often it drives the customers to be greedy and irrational and not very well informed. But sales are money in the bank. How many people are using a Sony Walkman these days? There was a time when everyone felt they had to buy one.

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I would have to say the BasicStamp did explode onto the market it was serving. Youall just weren't there and weren't aware. If you had a life-time subscription to Nuts and Volts from their start, you would have noticed the impact it made. And there were big battles in ad space between the BasicStamp and its clones for who was going to be king of the hill.

Genetix

Whiteoxe,

Parallax makes great products and they have the best product support I have ever seen. I myself have many BS2s and Parallax will continue to make and support the BS2 for many years to come. The BS2 is very easy to use even for a novice and as others have mentioned there are many books written on it. The BS2 is also designed for industrial use. At one company I worked for there are a production line tester that used a BS2.

The Arduino is recent but in the early 90's MIT created a similar setup called the Mini-Board and the Handy-Board which used the Motorola 68HC11 and could be programmed in C. Both boards were designed for making robots and cost about the same as the Arduino does today.

There is an old saying that you use the best tool for the job.