This doesn't make a lot of sense. They are *still* using other people's MCUs in the BS1 and the BS2 which are still active products. Apparently, they continue to trust Microchip to produce the required PIC chips. Maybe Ubicom was just a poor choice.
David
Contractual obligations or just plain old inertia, who knows?
I just know that Banzai with his Ardunio stepped in and ate their lunch when they failed to pay heed to the market place and they also lost those BS2 users who wanted a more powerful and flexible option.
I think a BS3 is viable if they roll out one with Basic Stamp compiler given Parallax's reputation for supporting their products.
Contractual obligations or just plain old inertia, who knows?
I just know that Banzai with his Ardunio stepped in and ate their lunch when they failed to pay heed to the market place and they also lost those BS2 users who wanted a more powerful and flexible option.
I think a BS3 is viable if they roll out one with Basic Stamp compiler given Parallax's reputation for supporting their products.
Maybe they could make a BS3 with a significantly faster PIC chip that would also support a JIT compiler to make pbasic run a lot faster.
I just know that Banzai with his Ardunio stepped in and ate their lunch when they failed to pay heed to the market place...
To be fair, I don't think anyone, including Banzai, expected there was such a market place. The creation of the Arduino created that market, as it were.
I for one looked at it, and being an old embedded systems guy thought it was pretty stupid. Totally overlooking the idea that there might be thousands of not so technical people out there who could make very good use of use of such a thing.
In the same way that the Raspberry Pi guys, Eben Upton and co., originally thought that they would only ever make a thousand or ten thousand Raspberry Pi.
Maybe they could make a BS3 with a significantly faster PIC chip that would also support a JIT compiler to make pbasic run a lot faster.
Correct, tho I think a new BS3 ideally needs USB link, for convenience, and right now I cannot see any PIC's in 5V Vcc.IO with USB.
I can find other vendor's 5V & USB, and PIC's may be close as Microchip have recently released 5V Vcc.IO parts
Checking the web, I see it says they use PIC16C57c on BS2. Wow.
That has the tail-pricing too, a rather high $2.10/1k for a 2K part ?
In contrast a faster/larger code 8 bit device like EFM8UB1 with 16kB/2304B RAM 12b ADC is $0.9315@1500.
That UB1 has 5V Vcc, and 5V tolerant IO but not 5V Drive
I can see 5V ARM M0 with 68KF/20KR for under the PIC16C57c price.
Why would anyone turn to an archaic BASIC machine today?
Did you forget those amazingly cheap Rasperry Pi machines. Use whatever language you like there.
The thing is, if you are a n00b, this is a bug, not a feature. PBasic may blook horribly limiting next to C++ but it is also extremely consistent. It's easy to get help and understand that help when something goes wrong, because the space of things you can do is limited.
Arduino got popular mainly by disguising all the cruft of C++ in "sketches" but it's all still under there if you peek under the sheet. Ugh.
And there is an advantage to having a clear, single language in which everyone works. Look at what's going on with the Propeller right now since so much attention has been diverted to gcc. When was the last time we got a really cool PASM driver creatively using the counter-timers to do something like SPI faster than it should have been possible? Last year I posted a Spin object that made it possible to do string manipulations without explicitly allocating buffers for every operation, which was once something of a holy grail, and it sank like a stone. I guess Spin is all so 2011 now.
Why would anyone turn to an archaic BASIC machine today?
The BS2 and tool chain is an extremely low drama programming environment. I've never had a crash of the IDE, and code samples are easy to obtain and glue together in completely new ways. I can usually bang out a BS2 project in an afternoon. This makes it ideal to use with kids and teens because there's no weirdness to workaround.
The Arduino shows its open source nature because everything works, most of the time. But sometimes that IDE is haunted and builds fail because it still has a temporary file open, or uploads fail, or it crashes. Now I put up with this when I want a cheap C++ microcontroller (a Freeduino is $13), but I'm an adult who's experienced with development tools.
Propeller/spin are hard to learn, silly syntax and bad code readability (in my opinion), so I won't go from BS to prop, even if it will cost $1 per chip.
I moved to the Propeller a year ago and at first Spin seemed intimidating but it's much nicer than C and only the most powerful BS2 commands lack Spin equivalents.
There is a BS2 Object, or library in other languages, that supports many of the commands while you learn Spin.
I probably learned the most though from the Propeller Education Kit text but there is a small tutorial in the Propeller Tool.
I have a list of the Spin equivalent to most of the BS2 commands found in What's a Microcontroller if you are interested. I just need to clean it up.
If understand the history correctly the only reason the Arduino exists is because some Italian guys wanted an educational platform and the BASIC Stamp whatever they were actually using was too expensive. So they made their own.
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.
Ummm... how many Raspberry Pi's are produced in one production run? I suspect economies of scale have something to do with this.
I doubt if open sourcing the tokenizer would have grown Parallax's market. It more than likely would have just caused knock-off product to under cut sales.
Added expense in California? That's why the American defense industries finally relocated to the mid-West. Wales may be one of the less expensive places to produce in the UK, while California is one of the most expensive in the US.
+++++++++++
All things considered, I am much happier that the Propeller is cheaper than the BasicStamp. Not sure that anyone but Parallax itself can explain the true reasons behind pricing.
+++++++++++
Why does the Arduino exist? Well, it seems some Italians had a desire to use chips that actually included an ADC and they had enough human resources in the form of students to develope a whole concept, a complete kit of documentation, and a marketing pitch that appealed to non-technical people.
This was evolution, not a direct challenge or response to the BasicStamp. In evolution, life forms can evolve and exist side-by-side with older life forms, right? So why say the BasicStamp must die because the Arduino lives? Each survives in its own niche.
The Italians could have used the BasicX or Zbasic clones of the BasicStamp and not both with creation of all the other fluff and documentation. The ZX-24 is cheaper than the BS2, and I think it is now open-sourced. But under the hood, it is far more complex than the BS2. Not exactly a great entry for new learners.
You have a point, they are making a lot of Pi. I think there is only one production run in Wales, it just runs non-stop. Of course there is one or more in China as well. Mass production certainly reduces unit cost.
Don't for get though that was not the initial plan. When they started out they imagined only ever selling a few thousand in the whole lifetime of the product.
I only point this out because it is quite a phenomena to have such large scale production of cheap items moved back home. If they can do it what about other manufacturers?
Who knows what open sourcing the BASIC, tools and hardware would have done. With hind sight it obviously had a big impact for the Arduino and other ventures.
Reading statements by the creators of the Arduino they were exactly motivated by the price of the STAMPs that they had been using in class. Sounds like a direct challenge to me. The ADC was a bonus.
Yeah, California for manufacturing might be stretching a point. What about Cleveland or somewhere cheaper?
I suppose Parallax might have relocated from Grass Valley, CA to Reno, NV. No income tax in Nevada and not anywhere near as complex labor laws. Reno is not far from Grass Valley.
But do you really expect anyone to move to Cleveland, Ohio from a place as nice as Grass Valley? Why not relocate to Siberia?
At some point, any economic venture is as much about the quality of life one desires as it is about economic success.
If one desires to climb aboard the treadmill of big capital and high finance and dodge any social responsiblity, success might actually be measured in great wealth.
The Raspberry Pi simply is a driven by a different culture, and so was the Arduinio.
Simplifications such as saying the Arduino was driven by the high cost of the BasicStamp ignore the reality that the Arduino was most likely driven by the huge success of the BasicStamp inspite of its seemingly high cost at that point in time.
There was a time when the BasicStamp success was driven by the high cost of PIC Basic software that was neither well-documented nor particularly reliable.
The history goes from success to success as people try to find a way to provide more for less. AND THAT MAY BE EXACTLY WHY THE PROPELLER IS CHEAPER THAN THE BASIC STAMP.
We have an awful lot of people that are judgemental about other people's successes or failures. I suspect many might call my life a failure, whereas I feel it has been a success.
To me, I appreciate the BasicStamp and the Propeller as products that have been successfully produced by small enterprise. Open-source can only carry you so far. It has survived on the back of big corporations and big finance. It started with cloning Unix, dependent on Intel, and a DARPA network scheme.
On the other hand, Parallax pretty much eked out a living with one product paying for the next and constantly finding a new niche to fill. This is what most people in the world HAVE to do. It takes bravery, courage, and tons of sleepless nights. So I just admire and respect it all the more.
Both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino gained a tremendous amount of internet exposure to aid their successes by activity on this forum. Rather than deny discussion of alternative products, Parallax has bravely kept an open dialog. Will either do the same for the next great device?
Comments
David
Contractual obligations or just plain old inertia, who knows?
I just know that Banzai with his Ardunio stepped in and ate their lunch when they failed to pay heed to the market place and they also lost those BS2 users who wanted a more powerful and flexible option.
I think a BS3 is viable if they roll out one with Basic Stamp compiler given Parallax's reputation for supporting their products.
I for one looked at it, and being an old embedded systems guy thought it was pretty stupid. Totally overlooking the idea that there might be thousands of not so technical people out there who could make very good use of use of such a thing.
In the same way that the Raspberry Pi guys, Eben Upton and co., originally thought that they would only ever make a thousand or ten thousand Raspberry Pi.
Now they are up to 5 million !
Life is full of surprises.
Correct, tho I think a new BS3 ideally needs USB link, for convenience, and right now I cannot see any PIC's in 5V Vcc.IO with USB.
I can find other vendor's 5V & USB, and PIC's may be close as Microchip have recently released 5V Vcc.IO parts
Checking the web, I see it says they use PIC16C57c on BS2. Wow.
That has the tail-pricing too, a rather high $2.10/1k for a 2K part ?
In contrast a faster/larger code 8 bit device like EFM8UB1 with 16kB/2304B RAM 12b ADC is $0.9315@1500.
That UB1 has 5V Vcc, and 5V tolerant IO but not 5V Drive
I can see 5V ARM M0 with 68KF/20KR for under the PIC16C57c price.
Or a MicroPython.
Or, heck, a good old C++ programmable Arduino.
Why would anyone turn to an archaic BASIC machine today?
Did you forget those amazingly cheap Rasperry Pi machines. Use whatever language you like there.
Times have changed.
The thing is, if you are a n00b, this is a bug, not a feature. PBasic may blook horribly limiting next to C++ but it is also extremely consistent. It's easy to get help and understand that help when something goes wrong, because the space of things you can do is limited.
Arduino got popular mainly by disguising all the cruft of C++ in "sketches" but it's all still under there if you peek under the sheet. Ugh.
And there is an advantage to having a clear, single language in which everyone works. Look at what's going on with the Propeller right now since so much attention has been diverted to gcc. When was the last time we got a really cool PASM driver creatively using the counter-timers to do something like SPI faster than it should have been possible? Last year I posted a Spin object that made it possible to do string manipulations without explicitly allocating buffers for every operation, which was once something of a holy grail, and it sank like a stone. I guess Spin is all so 2011 now.
The Arduino shows its open source nature because everything works, most of the time. But sometimes that IDE is haunted and builds fail because it still has a temporary file open, or uploads fail, or it crashes. Now I put up with this when I want a cheap C++ microcontroller (a Freeduino is $13), but I'm an adult who's experienced with development tools.
....zzzzzz.......zzzZZZzzzz.....zzzzzzz...hmpf?...wha?...where?...bee..es..thre...thre...three!?!?!
BS3! BS3!! BS3!! whoohoo!!!!
I moved to the Propeller a year ago and at first Spin seemed intimidating but it's much nicer than C and only the most powerful BS2 commands lack Spin equivalents.
There is a BS2 Object, or library in other languages, that supports many of the commands while you learn Spin.
I probably learned the most though from the Propeller Education Kit text but there is a small tutorial in the Propeller Tool.
I have a list of the Spin equivalent to most of the BS2 commands found in What's a Microcontroller if you are interested. I just need to clean it up.
Ummm... how many Raspberry Pi's are produced in one production run? I suspect economies of scale have something to do with this.
I doubt if open sourcing the tokenizer would have grown Parallax's market. It more than likely would have just caused knock-off product to under cut sales.
Added expense in California? That's why the American defense industries finally relocated to the mid-West. Wales may be one of the less expensive places to produce in the UK, while California is one of the most expensive in the US.
+++++++++++
All things considered, I am much happier that the Propeller is cheaper than the BasicStamp. Not sure that anyone but Parallax itself can explain the true reasons behind pricing.
+++++++++++
Why does the Arduino exist? Well, it seems some Italians had a desire to use chips that actually included an ADC and they had enough human resources in the form of students to develope a whole concept, a complete kit of documentation, and a marketing pitch that appealed to non-technical people.
This was evolution, not a direct challenge or response to the BasicStamp. In evolution, life forms can evolve and exist side-by-side with older life forms, right? So why say the BasicStamp must die because the Arduino lives? Each survives in its own niche.
The Italians could have used the BasicX or Zbasic clones of the BasicStamp and not both with creation of all the other fluff and documentation. The ZX-24 is cheaper than the BS2, and I think it is now open-sourced. But under the hood, it is far more complex than the BS2. Not exactly a great entry for new learners.
You have a point, they are making a lot of Pi. I think there is only one production run in Wales, it just runs non-stop. Of course there is one or more in China as well. Mass production certainly reduces unit cost.
Don't for get though that was not the initial plan. When they started out they imagined only ever selling a few thousand in the whole lifetime of the product.
I only point this out because it is quite a phenomena to have such large scale production of cheap items moved back home. If they can do it what about other manufacturers?
Who knows what open sourcing the BASIC, tools and hardware would have done. With hind sight it obviously had a big impact for the Arduino and other ventures.
Reading statements by the creators of the Arduino they were exactly motivated by the price of the STAMPs that they had been using in class. Sounds like a direct challenge to me. The ADC was a bonus.
Yeah, California for manufacturing might be stretching a point. What about Cleveland or somewhere cheaper?
But do you really expect anyone to move to Cleveland, Ohio from a place as nice as Grass Valley? Why not relocate to Siberia?
At some point, any economic venture is as much about the quality of life one desires as it is about economic success.
If one desires to climb aboard the treadmill of big capital and high finance and dodge any social responsiblity, success might actually be measured in great wealth.
The Raspberry Pi simply is a driven by a different culture, and so was the Arduinio.
Simplifications such as saying the Arduino was driven by the high cost of the BasicStamp ignore the reality that the Arduino was most likely driven by the huge success of the BasicStamp inspite of its seemingly high cost at that point in time.
There was a time when the BasicStamp success was driven by the high cost of PIC Basic software that was neither well-documented nor particularly reliable.
The history goes from success to success as people try to find a way to provide more for less. AND THAT MAY BE EXACTLY WHY THE PROPELLER IS CHEAPER THAN THE BASIC STAMP.
We have an awful lot of people that are judgemental about other people's successes or failures. I suspect many might call my life a failure, whereas I feel it has been a success.
To me, I appreciate the BasicStamp and the Propeller as products that have been successfully produced by small enterprise. Open-source can only carry you so far. It has survived on the back of big corporations and big finance. It started with cloning Unix, dependent on Intel, and a DARPA network scheme.
On the other hand, Parallax pretty much eked out a living with one product paying for the next and constantly finding a new niche to fill. This is what most people in the world HAVE to do. It takes bravery, courage, and tons of sleepless nights. So I just admire and respect it all the more.
Both the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino gained a tremendous amount of internet exposure to aid their successes by activity on this forum. Rather than deny discussion of alternative products, Parallax has bravely kept an open dialog. Will either do the same for the next great device?