More affordable chip

libadman

Hi there to all, I used a propeller chip once upon a time just to play with. I like all the options it had over the BS2 but I found it a little harder to get used to vs the stamp, So now I'm looking to buy other micro-controllers that offers the same features and ease of use as the propeller or basic stamp 2 for a cheaper price point. I see some chips start at a few cents, surely I don't wanna waste my time buying crappy parts but I'm not even sure where to start. I found and old chip and it wanted like 3-4 softwares and I still did not understand how to program it tho it was minimal in features and had only 33 or so words in its language. Is there a popular chip people use?
Some things I would like the chip to do:

Video output (NTSC/PAL/VGA like propeller)
ADC analog to digital converter
Multiple I/O
Serial communication
Wireless (would be nice but not needed-any type)
Ram
On board memory (not a must)
Multitasking (like the 8 cores able to simultaneously work with propeller)
DIP package
General-purpose
Mice, keyboards, LCDs
Stepper motors and sensors.

I would be appreciative of any help or advice. Thanks in advance

also I only know like mouser and digikey to buy parts besides parallax- is there somewhere more affordable I should be looking?

ErNa

I fear, you will find a better P in a better world ;-)

jmg

libadman wrote: »

Hi there to all, I used a propeller chip once upon a time just to play with. I like all the options it had over the BS2 but I found it a little harder to get used to vs the stamp, So now I'm looking to buy other micro-controllers that offers the same features and ease of use as the propeller or basic stamp 2 for a cheaper price point. I see some chips start at a few cents, surely I don't wanna waste my time buying crappy parts but I'm not even sure where to start. I found and old chip and it wanted like 3-4 softwares and I still did not understand how to program it tho it was minimal in features and had only 33 or so words in its language. Is there a popular chip people use?
Some things I would like the chip to do:

Video output (NTSC/PAL/VGA like propeller)
ADC analog to digital converter
Multiple I/O
Serial communication
Wireless (would be nice but not needed-any type)
Ram
On board memory (not a must)
Multitasking (like the 8 cores able to simultaneously work with propeller)
DIP package
General-purpose
Mice, keyboards, LCDs
Stepper motors and sensors.

I would be appreciative of any help or advice. Thanks in advance

also I only know like mouser and digikey to buy parts besides parallax- is there somewhere more affordable I should be looking?

That's quite a laundry-list

If you stipulate :
*Video output (NTSC/PAL/VGA like propeller)
*Multitasking (like the 8 cores able to simultaneously work with propeller)
*DIP package
The choice is easy - The Propeller !

Video output is niche, and 8 cores is certainly not common, and DIP is also rare these days....
I know of no one offering Wireless and DIP MCUs. The GHz needed is not compatible with DIP packaging.

Brian Fairchild

If you still want to program in Basic then have a look at 'Micromite'.

Cluso99

Don’t think you will find a multicore processor other than the P1 unless you want a dual core ARM which is way more difficult to program than a P1,
In DIP packaging, you are extremely limited.
And we haven’t even got to the other requirements.

iseries

It sounds like you want a ready made system rather than a chip to build from.

Reading your list I would go with a Raspberry PI. For the $34 you get your laundry list already done. Just plug it in and start coding. It has several pins just like the P1 and they can be programmed to interface to many devices.

Mike

rosco_pc

Go for a pi zero w. Even cheaper, all the same features and wireless build-in

macrobeak

Pi has got 8 cores?

Mark_T

Its got a GPU, so yes, if you do shader coding 24GFLOPS no less.

libadman

Wow! Lol 😆 well everyone provided me with exactly what I was looking for. I just wanted a common easily usable affordable chip even if a bunch of the stuff was missing, but it’s good to know that the features of the propeller are unique, I had no idea how special it is lol. I will stick with the stamps and propeller depending on application. I ask for dip because I’m no machine and I’m not sure about wanting to soider 100+ pins that’s micro. But I was only asking to see what else is out there. I do not have a project in mind just searching around. Thanks everyone

libadman

Oh and I have used the andruno uno and I’ve had some version of the raspberry board- I like the propeller and stamp better

Mickster

This is a bit of an oddball...it's like the aforementioned Micromite but on steroids. All it needs is the chip and a capacitor to run.

It's WAY faster than even the fastest Micromite and supports multitasking.
The language is no longer being developed but I don't care, it's already very capable and it's interactive.

At 40MHz, it runs an empty FOR/NEXT, 1,280,000/sec. The hex file is free.

http://www.bypic.co.uk/

w8an

If you wanna play with a modern chip with a BASIC interpreter, the ESP32 has an "Easter Egg". Pull GPIO 12 high and hit reset and your terminal will respond with ">". Enter "about" and get the response: ESP32 ROM Basic (c)2016 Espressif Shanghai ...

https://hackaday.com/2016/10/27/basic-interpreter-hidden-in-esp32-silicon/

The article states that peek and poke do not work, but they do.

yeti

@w8an that's an ancient Tiny-BASIC in a modern chip. Not worth more than some minutes of attention. It even may have a copyright issue: If you go back the ancestry line you'll end in a 68000 root which was only free for personal use, which surely did not mean embedding in a commercial context. Someone just changed that license to a more free one and there is no trace about the original author having agreed to that.

And it is very incapable and has some bugs the current author refuses to fix.

Invest your time in better toys.

localroger

Yeti, copyright is a very nebulous thing when talking about something like a computer language. You cannot copyright an idea; you can only copyright the expression of an idea. So if you write a Tiny Basic interpreter in 68000 assembly language and I rewrite it using the exact same logic but in 8080A assembly language, there is almost no chance of my act being considered infringing, and neither of us has a claim on the guy who rewrites it again in C. Every implementation of Tiny Basic adds or removes functions or features according to the local hardware environment and that means they are all essentially different products. It's very different from patent and trademark, both of which do allow claims on ideas in certain narrowly defined ways.

Tiny Basic was meant to do what Forth soon ended up doing better, providing a very low memory footprint way of doing basic interactive functions on a small computer. It was really the first practical language to be implemented for home computers in the mid-1970's when those machines had 1K or maybe if you were extravagant 4K of RAM. "Level I" Basic for the TRS-80 was essentially a port of Tiny Basic. ("Level II" Basic was Microsoft's first chance to suck to its full glory.) Tiny Basic could do surprisingly grand things if it provided the keywords and you had enough RAM.

yeti

It even may have a copyright issue

I did not write "it has" and that's only one of several points against it.

localroger

OK let me clarify then. "It may have a copyright issue" is incorrect. It doesn't and can't have a copyright issue at this point. And there are definitely better solutions, one of which is embedded in the P2 ROM.