Propellers cheaper than Basic Stamps, oh my
localroger
Posts: 3,451
I don't go to Basic Stamp land very often any more but I have a little personal project where I might want to read a couple of thermistors and toggle a couple of Peltier modules accordingly, and I recalled that that's super easy to do in PBasic so I headed over to see WTF the BS1 is thirty bucks now? Making both the Prop Mini and Project Board USB cheaper at $25? This ain't natural, folks. Kids are going to be buying starter Prop boards and working their way up to PBasic.
Comments
Only Radio Shack's was stranger.
A. The BasicStamp costs more to produce. (Actually made at Parallax in USA.)
B. There is still a market for it, and Parallax is commited to legacy product support.
C. Parallax desires to provide an incentive to migrate to the Propeller. Less costly certainly provides such an incentive.
Well there certainly are successful businesses which do this kind of aggressive pricing to market, but I had the general impression that Parallax was a bit nicer about things like that than, say, Pfizer.
They need that money for the P2 project anyway
If one does a Parallax.com shopping cart list for Microcontrollers, and selects to view by popularity, the first BS1 product are a page and a half down in the list, next to a brownout detector component. They buy the BD as a final product, but have to inventory lots more parts to build and then manufacture a single BS1 board. Oh the cost, the cost!
Also, the BASIC Stamps have traditionally had higher standard sales prices. Apart from sustaining a healthy distributor biz, I betcha heavy discounting goes on within the ed market. I dunna think all BS1s and 2s sell for the list price.
Two more words for you: Lifetime warranty.
Smoke 'em if you got 'em!
In a related story:
Man I'm tired of this stripped-down forum with no buttons for bold, italic, pics or vids. It's not much fun manually type [/img] and [/video]. Any progress on the Forum Restoration Project, Parallax?
The Gen 0 BS1 maybe, but the web says this about the product line in general :
["customers have put [B]well over three million BASIC Stamp modules[/B] into use"]
- now that is not what I'd call "pretty slow moving" - that sounds like a solid market base.
Volumes may be down on what they were, but nothing suggests a 'go away' price is needed yet.
In fact, I'm puzzled why Parallax do not seem to have plans for a BS3 ?
- there are plenty of 5V 32Bit MCUs out there now, that would boost the Stamp nicely, and give a 100% retrofit which is both easy to support and safe to ramp up.
P.S. There are BS2 clones from china, which are cheap enough (<$10) if not mistaken and are pin to pin compatible and also BS editor recognizes them as genuine parallax product. (There was thread about them, use search if interested).
P.P.S So I wish guys@parallax will re-think their business model and start to offer something cheaper and BS compatible (at least, in software).
As for the BS3 I think Mike Green explained it, they don't want to use other peoples MCU's anymore after the Ubicom fiasco. Hence their refusal to do a BS3. Which is sad because it left users with no upgrade path. Either use the Prop or go with another board like the Arduino. And we all know where most of the users went - the Arduino. And now with the PIC32 Micromite which can be had for the price of a Big Mac, they'd have some tough competition if they decided to do a BS3 today.
The BS2 is no doubt a cash cow and steady revenue stream in the educational market, though dwindling. You can ride the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy for a while, but sooner or later technology catches up. I agree with jmg, what this country needs is a good $20 BS3 with hoards of new features but is fully backwards compatible. There are lots of dusty BoeBots on shelves and attics out there. If the owners heard news that for $20 they could upgrade and get a Bluetooth connection and an iPhone/Android app, I think that would generate some buzz and revenue.
Better yet, pull a Windows 10 and jump straight to a BS4.
It may seem that the Arduino is a 'cost competitive' alternative. But the whole programming language scheme is far more involved. There is simply the possibility to overwhelm the novice with too much information.
Smallness both in language and architectural resources can be extremely useful in the beginning. As Leonardo DaVinci supposedly said, "Small spaces discipline the mind." Too many resources in the beginning can get very sloppy and distracting.
But I also suspect that the cost of writing the amount of good documentation that the BS2 included is rather daunting to any up-date that changes the concept much.
The PICs don't clock as fast or have as much RAM as the SXes for a comparible chip... that is why the Ubicom was percieved as an advantage.
There are clones that provide the same pinout at the BS2 with much higher sophistication in programing. But those tend to defeat the whole introductory learning purpose of a BS2 and put them into a catagory similar to an Arduino.
My gut feeling for the best way forward is Propeller Basic and a Propeller MINI. In many ways, trying to back-track to the halcyon days of the BS2 with a BS3 may lead nowhere profitable.
With hindsight we might speculate that had Parallax open sourced the whole thing at the time they would have grown the market many fold and the fact that clones appeared would not have detracted from their sales. People who want "Made in America" would still have bought the originals.
This whole "added expense of made in California" turns out to be a myth. The Raspberry Pi is made in Wales for goodness sake. Turns out you can make stuff "home grown" at a price competitive with anything from China or wherever.
Seriously, many of you are comparing quite different business models, so compare everything. Don't keep cherry-picking the comparison points.
Nice idea, bu t the elephant in the room there, is lack of 5V operation.
However, there are chips available in 2015, that can give an upgrade and run on 5V / 5V IO.
Microchip have been releasing more 5V parts, so maybe they will have one this year that can do proper 5V IO and USB ?
Is Parallax in the chip business? If so everything said about chips and prices of chips is relevant here.
Is Parallax in the educational materials/support business? If so why spend millions on chip design? Why not just use the Arduino or whatever?
What is the plan here?
You're asking in the wrong place, and of the wrong people.