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Daisy Chain Propellers? — Parallax Forums

Daisy Chain Propellers?

gennarobasso81gennarobasso81 Posts: 84
edited 2014-07-09 13:06 in Propeller 1
Is It possible to connect two Propellers together. so instead of 8 cogs you could have 14 (subtract one cog per chip to connect)? I'm not asking for any reason other than to see if I can be done. Why stop at two...can you connect three or four?

Comments

  • LoopyBytelooseLoopyByteloose Posts: 12,537
    edited 2014-07-06 22:08
    Yes it is. There are quite a few ways to do (asynchronous serial or synchronous serial are mostly used). We have several multiple Propeller board projects that have been built with individual Propellers being deployed in different ways (one for a video terminal, one for a memory manager, and another for multiple general purpose CPUs). Or you can have a level design with just more cogs.

    PropForth even provides a system for controlling and communicating with individual cogs under such a scheme.

    The Propeller 2 will have significantly more Hubram, 16 cogs, and several new features ... including ADC and DAC i/o. In many cases, that will make doubling up on Propeller no longer necessary. I guess it won't have all the ROM features of a video font, binary log table, and binary sine table. It will run faster as well.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-07-07 00:05
    Yes of course. Like any other micro-controller you can hook them together using UART, SPI, I2C the protocol of your choice.

    How could you have missed this thread http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/156350-PropBus-Single-wire-multi-propeller-comm-link which has been discussing this topic for some days now?

    However, in the simple cases you need to program each Propeller independently with their own separate programs. What would be cool is to be able to write a single program that contains parts for multiple connected Propellers and be able to load that program into the "network" in one go via a single programming connection.

    I believe people have created software that allows a "master" Propeller to reset a "slave" Propeller and download code to it. I have no idea if anyone worked that sort of thing into an integrated system.
  • lardomlardom Posts: 1,659
    edited 2014-07-08 13:51
    I have imagined a mobile robot with a pan/tilt camera and an arm that I control remotely. I think I can do it all by 'naming' each Propeller.
  • Bruce SmithBruce Smith Posts: 5
    edited 2014-07-09 04:18
    Thanks for the thread. May a times it gets necessary to combine the propellers to reduce complexity and time usage. This will surely help.
  • DaveJensonDaveJenson Posts: 375
    edited 2014-07-09 13:06
    Check out this old thread:

    http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/124343-Parallax-Propeller-Programs-Propellers-in-ParallelV1.0-Tribute-to-the-BigBoy-4?highlight=bigboy

    This works really well.
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