Program P8X32A directly?
wibblewobble
Posts: 5
Hi,
I have designed a prototype using the Quickstart board.
I would like to now make my own PCB and use the P8X32A chip.
Is there a piece of hardware that I can use to flash each chip or do I need to put some sort of interface (USB?) on to my PCB?
Possibly there is even matching socket for the P8X32A chips available?
Thank you!
I have designed a prototype using the Quickstart board.
I would like to now make my own PCB and use the P8X32A chip.
Is there a piece of hardware that I can use to flash each chip or do I need to put some sort of interface (USB?) on to my PCB?
Possibly there is even matching socket for the P8X32A chips available?
Thank you!
Comments
I would suggest the propplug route...
http://parallax.com/product/32201
I see I would either make some pads to receive the "prop clip" or a header for the "prop plug"..
Pretty neat!
Be aware, the Prop Clip has not been available for over a year, so you don't want to incorporate those pads.
Also you do not "Flash" the Propeller chip. You are either programming the RAM on the chip,(one time until the power is lost), or you are programming the EEPROM connected to the Propeller chip.
Here is on schematic of a board with the EEPROM:
http://www.parallax.com/sites/default/files/downloads/32100-Propeller-Demo-Board-Schematic-RevG_0.pdf
Please ask if you need any more information.
10 kW resistor for i2c EEPROM SDA pin? :-]
10kW = 10,000 WATTS - man, that is some huge resistor there !
@ww: Just design in at least the 4 pins that's compatible with the Prop Plug, so that you have GND,RST,RXD,TXD and you can grab a cheap USB to 6-pin TTL converter off ebay which has the RTS signal which can also be used for resetting and programming the Prop (normally DTR). Just modify the pinout from the adapter to suit the standard Prop layout then.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/6pin-FTDI-FT232RL-USB-to-Serial-adapter-module-USB-TO-TTL-RS232-Arduino-Cable-/400356015296
Before you commit your pcb you will save yourself time and money and disappointments if you submit the design to this forum where we can tell you what you might need to change or add etc.
BTW, when you say "socket" I hope you don't mean for the QFP44. If you want to socket a chip you best use the 40-pin DIP.
Thank you for the replies and info.
Yes, I'm pretty new to all this. I'm basically using a quickstart with a Micro SD breakout, 3.7 V LIPO battery and 2 micro switches for input.
It seems as though the Propeller Mini would work for me but it is 6V.
I'm going to have someone design the PCB for me as this is beyond my skill.
I'll be sure to start a new thread when I have a design started.
Thanks again for the tips!
I had no idea! Learn something new every day.
There are lots of small Prop designs around.
Here's a thread where I've been documenting my small Prop board.
I have nine of the small boards on a 10 cm x 10 cm PCB.
While I like my design, it's pretty basic compared to a lot of the other designs to be found on the forum.
Yes, they may want to correct that, along with the 100kW, 240W, and various other typos on the schematic.
I looked all over the schematic to see if Heater had his initials in there somewhere
You could program the EEPROM using a Professional Development board and then install it on your circuit board. That greatly simplifies your board design if frequent reprogramming isn't required.
Sandy
If so, may I suggest you put the reset transistor circuit on your board too (a linkable option).
My CpuBlade is 1"x1" with all pins brought out, requires 5V and has 3V3 onboard. I also have the reset transistor circuit on board so you can use a cheap USB-TTL converter, and power from the USB too.
W = ohms (small omega), not watts.
When preparing electronic documents, some document editing software will attempt to use the Symbol typeface to render the Ω character. Where the font is not supported, a W is displayed instead ("10 W" instead of "10 Ω", for instance). As W represents the watt, the SI unit of power, not resistance, this can lead to confusion.
As I have often said unicode should be banned. It is slowly rotting all our documents as they get moved from system to system and mis-conversions occur that nobody notices. The web is riddled with it and it's unfixable.
(Thanks for digging up the explanation for the Ω->W transformation btw - good to know.)
-Tor
The alternative to Unicode would indeed be ASCII.
Some hundreds (thousands?) of years ago we rationalized our number system around the world. We gave up Roman numerals and whatever other symbols and bases people were using and settled on the ten digits we have today.
Similarly the human race should rationalize the language mess we have. ASCII is there, it's simple, compact, reliable. The perfect choice.
Yeah, yeah, I know I'm dreaming...
The alternative is never ever send out a Unicode text unless you supply the fonts for all the symbols you are using as well. How else are you supposed to know that what people see is what you sent?
Selecting UTF-8 or whichever encoding does not help with these problems.
The wikipedia explanation of the Ω->W problem is a bit puzzling. So some software realizes it does not have a font for the Ω symbol. So rather than display the Unicode Replacement Character � or whatever it should do in that case it decides to be clever and display a W instead. That might be OK if it only gets as far as some display that does not support the font. I presume (hope) that the underlying document still as Ω not W. But then, some other software or part of the same program has scraped from the display and screwed everything up.
Make that definitely not kwinn's mistake ;-)
I had nothing to do with that schematic, and make enough goofs of my own that I don't need to take credit for those someone else makes.
Interesting comment on unicode, and it explains a lot of what I encountered when I had to clean up a database. Unfortunately unicode conversions are not the only contributor to the rot. The reliance on spell checkers and lack of proof reading often results in an incorrect word rather than a misspelled one, and that can be even worse than an oddball character here and there.
Extending that to 4K7, 1M2, 1K5 so the decimal point is replaced by the range character would also work. It was very easy to miss the decimal point in some of the old printed schematics, and almost as easy on a laptop/tablet display at times.
No joke.
Over the years, I've rendered a lot of things I wanted to preserve into PDF, or archived them as bitmaps. At least that way, I get to see what I saw before. Sucks not having it be as useful as text though, but it sucks more not to be able to read it, or have it be gone, or mangled.
A while back I had neighbors who got to be good friends. Their kids played with my kids kind of thing. The mother was Asian, immigrated to the US via marriage, and she was probably the most fun and definitely the best neighbor I've ever had. She worked on the airlines and was always bringing me goofy things from the markets over there. I think she just wanted to see my reaction as we would chatter about each one for a time. Good times.
Her family did not speak much English, and they for sure could not write it. Sending e-mails was a PITA, and almost nothing worked consistently for them. Mostly, they would burn phone time, and this was around the '00's, where it wasn't quite cheap to do that.
One day, I had her just use Paint. It was easy enough to drop it onto a bitmap using some fonts I found that would work between them. Never heard about it again, until many years later. She asked me for a quick way to archive and or package up the pictures. I looked into a directory and found tons of simple bitmaps, most of them 2 color, but a lot of them multi-color with this beautiful writing, sprinkled with the occasional doodle, or little picture.
They got converted into an album in PDF for her kids to read later on, and it turns out a lot of them were stories from Grannie and Grandpa.
Had that gotten done in some odd mismash of fonts, encodings, software? Ugh. It would have been lost, and for sure, the little subtle things one sees on paper would not be there.
I'm not saying it's perfect, or even efficient, but the basic bitmap has some merit at times.
Of course, the other case I run into frequently is TIFF encoded drawings. The ones from overseas (I'm in the US) are kind of amazing. They look like technical drawings, but there again one sees lots of subtle info that simply would not be encoded otherwise. It's easy to drop those into some CAD software (assuming that CAD software can take an image and do sane scaling and tracing on it), get the writing translated, and then pluck out the details for manufacture today.
Those same drawings done with CAD often suffer what I call "font losses" leaving little boxes, symbols and a general mess where some intent or other used to be...
Today, an image export of key design data is a core part of any product data management scheme I implement, specify, or work with. Font losses are why.
Heater is right on this. We are seeing a big mess slowly accumulate. Won't be pretty.
BTW: Plain old ASCII isn't friendly to many parts of the world. But, ASCII and simple bitmaps are, and that's what I used to do engineering work, and still will use, when dealing in multi-language environments.
And today, a 2 color, or if you want it to look nice, 16 color, maybe all grey scale, bitmap is portable to most things, can scale up to insane page sizes, etc...
No arguments here. Bit map graphics are simple to use and great for many things. In the early days of pc's schematic capture and pcb layout software was way too expensive for personal use so I used a drawing program instead. When Windows and Paint came along it was simple to import all the bit mapped component and symbol graphics I had created over a period of time. No way would that have been anywhere near as pain free if I had used proprietary software for that.
Still use Paint and some of those original bit map graphics for the initial block diagrams when starting a new project.
And how are you going to parse that in any program?
You aren't. At least not some simple program.
Paint sees as much use as notepad does on my Windows machines. Notepad will strip down text to the basics, and Paint is where I can combine images and text. The amount of useful information one can stuff into an image is nuts! I do it frequently.
One use case new to me is capturing CAM Milling tool data. We go to buy a new tool, and it needs a definition in the CAM system. I quickly snag the manufacturer data, which is nearly always some image and some tabulated text. Combine both in paint, along with a snapshot of the tool definition image, file pathnames, etc... and store for use later. Only one program, Paint, is needed. No formatting issues, no hassles, no having to learn lots of little functions either. Cut, paste, crop, draw, text, save.
Early on, I shunned images, and for many of the reasons given. But, after embracing them, I find the workflow is really difficult to beat. Entire programs get created for the purpose of doing what one can do in a simple painting type application.
My new phone is a Note 4, and it's got the little pen. I've already used it to sketch some ideas, exchange with another person, refine, etc...
So there is the "can I use it with a program?" case, and there is "can I communicate with another person?" case. Ideally, with ASCII, we do a lot of both. However, there are a ton of activities that really don't warrant use of a program, and those are near bullet proof when done with simple images.
Discussing this circuit would be one of them.
BTW: What you do instead is drop text on the image, skip trying to "write" with the mouse, unless you've got a tablet, pen, whatever, and combine that text with images for the best use case. Again, in the context of this thread, annotating a schematic would be perfect. Drop the visual schematic into an image, then use the text tool to provide notes, draw lines, highlight, and essentially do what one would do on a white board.
Frankly, I would love to get a white board that can overlay images, drag them, scale, etc.... I have done this with projectors to great effect. Snap a picture of the end product, email distribute, and one gets lean, effective, communication. I very frequently do this when teaching classes. Drop the example on the white board, annotate with markers, answer Q&A with the same, capture, email to students later. Super easy, very effective.
Heck, I designed a fence for our backyard a while back using images. Go to Google, get the Sat image, drop into CAD, scale. One pixel ended up being 8" in one direction, and I think it was 7 or 9" in the other. From there, overlay grid, draw fence, position, and it's good to about an inch, super easy, cheezy. Doing this any other way takes a lot of effort, and additional software, or time and materials.
Edit: Of course it's not so easy to fix typos in images, see "hour" above
The only way ASCII could replace UTF-8 is if everybody writes English only. What a poor world that would be.
Potatohead's bitmap images is better. But really, UTF-8 does work. I had problems for years, but now it seems to get easier than ever - the support is becoming universal. I don't have many issues handling the two locations I have in my profile.
As for the problem with the schematic.. JDat and kwinn described a common ASCII-friendly variant. Works fine.
I have only a single issue with UTF-8: In the past I could filter spam from certain countries by their specific charset email header.. now I can't!
-Tor
The English language is spoken all around the world with many and various pronunciations. Some of which make English speakers from different places almost unintelligible to each other.
All of that phonetic mess can be written with the English alphabet in ASCII.
This suggests to me that there is no possible reason for Norwegian or any other European language to have those odd letters added to their alphabets or the various accent marks.
Example: In Finnish the is "a" and their is "