DON"T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU
rjo__
Posts: 2,114
My guess is that many(and certainly more than one) P1 users will migrate over to the P2 when the dust settles and the smoke clears. I'm think that will be right around the beginning of February.
If you feel the inclination, after you get there, you are going to want a PROPCAM. You will be able to do things that you may have never considered or thought was impossible.
forums.parallax.com/discussion/170854/stereo-propcam-final-silicon-1cog-8-pins-550fps-360mhz-480-clocks-left#latest
The bad news is that their is a limited supply of PropCams and when they are gone... they will be gone forever.
I've looked around and I don't see a similar camera on the horizon.
THE GOOD NEWS.... PROPCAMS are ON sale for 20% off until January 2.
take my advice... order a couple.
ERCO... that means you too!. Don't be cheap. I take your advice every time... I have more sh.. from China than I know what to do with.
Just this once... don't think about it. Just do it.
we need emogees around here
If you feel the inclination, after you get there, you are going to want a PROPCAM. You will be able to do things that you may have never considered or thought was impossible.
forums.parallax.com/discussion/170854/stereo-propcam-final-silicon-1cog-8-pins-550fps-360mhz-480-clocks-left#latest
The bad news is that their is a limited supply of PropCams and when they are gone... they will be gone forever.
I've looked around and I don't see a similar camera on the horizon.
THE GOOD NEWS.... PROPCAMS are ON sale for 20% off until January 2.
take my advice... order a couple.
ERCO... that means you too!. Don't be cheap. I take your advice every time... I have more sh.. from China than I know what to do with.
Just this once... don't think about it. Just do it.
we need emogees around here
Comments
I should also have said that I have no proprietary interest in the P2. I'm just a fan.
-Phil
https://parallax.com/product/28320
For serious developers, the P1 will always be useful. P1 sales might actually increase as new serious minded developers are attracted to the P2.
For guys tinkering with other stuff and use the P1 to do that stuff... the P1 will always be useful. For those that are happy and don't want to change... etc.
Most people can't get enough... offer them more and they will take it.
OK 95% is probably too high.
90% final answer:) it might take a year or two.
Your a bit too optimistic. In the 80s and 90s, there was the mantra learn C and save your jobs aimed at COBOL programmers. Seemed right on the surface, but quite in my opinion misguided. Notably for reasons similar to those mentioned above. If one has a billion dollar business running on as many lines of tested and proven code, why would you spend as much to move to new untested code? There is no shortage for work if one is good at COBOL.
So here you have the Prop1 with a mix of proven tools, Parallax's PropTool, Catalina C, BST (still runs perfectly for me in linux and windows 10), and a host of others of variying reliability and useability. There are tons of publicly available blocks of code for nearly anything you can imagine in the obex and in the forums. And I would be willing to bet that many commercial users on and off the forum share a lot of code and techniques behind the scenes to help each other out informally or otherwise as seems to be the culture of the forum and parallax users in general.
Enter the long awaited Prop 2. New hardware, imature tool base, minimal code base. While it appears to have some significant new capabilities, it still remains to be seen if these new capabilities are required for a given project. I still have not really looked very far beyond the obvious differences. It also costs about 4x the Prop 1. DIP/SMD does not matter to my thinking, at least for the commercial user. Hobbiest, well you have the dev board, maybe a modified SchmartBoard or roll your own. Given the current state of the products readiness for the commercial market, I would venture to guess that it will be a year or two before the tools and available supports for this chip are in place to the level that a commercial venture would be comfortable betting the farm on this chip in any significant product development as opposed to the P1 which now has a proven track record. (Sounds similar to the P1 history I have seen mentioned around the forum)
As to the comment "... offer them more", no. The balance is still what is the total cost of the project including tools, learning and design, long term maintainability, product stability and availability of parts over the lifetime of the project, blah, blah, blah. And can I trust a project using the P2 to generate enough revenue to meet the requirements and provide the desired return on investment. MicroChip still makes a ton of cheap 8 bit controllers as well as their high end processors. Parallax now have the P1 and when it is proven and trusted, the P2.
Pardon the book, just got on a roll. The P2 is still a new device with a purpose and certain capabilities, but should not be presented as the next high tech snake oil... its not. 1-2 years, P1/P2 == 75%/25% with a significant shift in the ratio once the P2 has established itself as a viable choice.
ganz so schlimm ist es auch nicht.
Compared to the launch of the P1 the P2 has a ABUNDANCE of software tools.
NATIVE we have now TAQOZ Forth, P2nut, Catalina C and Eric's Compiler Collection with Spin 1.5, Basic and quite working C.
If you are willing to use Eric's RiscV JIT emulator, you can use GCC for c/c++/whatever with all it's bells and problems GCC has.
Parallax announced to move OBEX and other user provided content to a centralized Parallax Git Hub, that is a major step in the right direction but they need to build some search and integrate feature around it, I am not sure how long it will take them.
Currently it is not easy to follow the different threads to find P2 objects, but they are out there, even a quite big collection of Spins Standard Library converted for P2.
It is all there just needs to get organized by someone at Parallax, and I am pretty sure they will do that.
Think of it as a spring slowly being loaded. It will not be Chipmas but I am very sure that there is a lot of stuff being prepared right now at Parallax for the final release somewhere in March or whenever the chips arrive in larger quantities.
And @"Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)",
I do understand that you can not build more of them PropCams, but since you sold most of them it seems to be a market there, how about a newer version?
just teasing,
Mike
I am not always right:)
True story. I was half watching the BBC earlier in the evening and they were reporting about the latest incident. They showed the Prime Minister walking at the scene with a female police official who was apparently in charge. The reported gave her name as Prester Dick... which was funny to me because police detectives are sometimes called dicks. It was even funnier because if you say her name really slowly it sounds like an improper act with a trans-s____
I chuckled to myself not believing that anyone would name there daughter that way.
Finally I rewound the tape... you know its all digital but anyway-- I went back and reran the scene several times... and it just wasn't Prester. It was some name I had never heard before:)
That's kind of the way it is. Sometimes I'm right and sometimes I'm not.
Now I've decided to write some shorts stories... try to guess the name of the main character:)
With P2, if we need a function someone else has generously put in the OBEX who knows what we will find? Will it be in Spin, C (which version?), Forth... all of those and maybe others will be viable. Will I need all those development systems in case the example HDMI or ethernet code I need is written in one or the other? The great strength of the Propeller's architecture is in those drivers which make it capable of emulating such a wide range of hardware. If they are less accessible because of language confusion, that is not a good thing.
localroger,
The comparison should be the state of the P1 and the available technical resources in late preproduction and the current state of the P2 and its environment. The P2 silicon has been approved, and the P2 is "in production." But that is different from saying it has been "released."
I wasn't around in the preproduction period of the P1. When I finally found the P1 a year or two later, the data sheet for the P1 was about 5 pages long and completely incomprehensible to anyone without a deep background, certainly not by me.
We already have exhaustive documentation. About 95% of that documentation is easily readable by any experienced P1 user... you don't have to be an expert.
What we don't have yet, but we feel the footsteps, is Spin2. The rough description we have now and what we know about how it will work is just spectacular.
We already have translation tools... they aren't perfect yet (No Spin2:) but right around the release of the P2, it should be possible to run P1 code on the P2, sometimes with minor modifications... sometimes without touching it.
So, that P1 tool chain is still going to be important and useful until the overall gestalt of the P2 is fully realized. We will be able to use P1 tools to make P2 code...if we want to.
One of the challenges for a new user will be seeing the forest from the trees. The shear volume of information is going to be challenging. I remember how easy it was to use the P1 if you could just find the information. It was spread all over the place. The same questions were asked repeatedly, because the mountain of information just grew and grew and grew.
With the P2, the size of source documentation is challenging but if you ask a question, someone will point you to the right section of the right version in the right location:)
The documentation will be better than it is now. But the important thing is that it will all be in one place, and we will know where to look.
Yes, there may be many more tools available than P1 release, but as noted they are scattered 7734 to breakfast as the old saying goes. Likely because few are actual Parallax products are under Parallax control. And I can't tell which are somebodys love project subject to go away or at least out of support without reason or warning as BST did. They may be great tools, but accountable for future availability or maintenance to no one. At least the Parallax PropTool is a company owned (if not much supported now) tool. It will be there as long as Parallax P1. As I mentioned before I like BST, but one day it will become unusable. There is the expectation that as long as P1 is being produced, Parallax will be expected to keep the PropTool working. Not to do so would likely tank them perhaps in the hobby world, certainly in the commercial world.
At this point, I don't see a company controlled repository of tools that can be found easily. The only thing I find at this point is cluso99's thread of links, good start, but need to sift through a lot to find possible solutions.
@msrobots has pretty much said the same above, but Parallax has made so many starts and stops and full resets when it comes to tools........ Watch and wait I guess
The video sensor used in the PropCAM is pretty unique. It's a grayscale sensor that has low resolution compared to modern designs, but it makes up for that with an extremely high possible frame rate and the fact that it does not use a "rolling shutter": all pixels are exposed simultaneously.
-Phil
-Phil