Yeah, he has a youtube channel. On this video someone commented:
"The P2 community misses you."
to which his response was over a month later:
"Is there much happening there lately? I thought it was still going around in little circles and developing compilers but no real applications, just demos.."
So he's not using bad health as an excuse, but doesn't seem to have any intention to actually produce the P2D2, or refund the people who paid him either, apparently.
How sad.
I hope you guys all get your money back in the end, or some sort of equitable communication and compromise you can reconcile with. It's not nice for anyone when that happens.
"Is there much happening there lately? I thought it was still going around in little circles and developing compilers but no real applications, just demos.."
So he's not using bad health as an excuse, but doesn't seem to have any intention to actually produce the P2D2, or refund the people who paid him either, apparently.
How sad.
Unfortunatelly, there is some truth in his words. I hope the P2 won't suffer t he same fate as the Amiga in the 90s. It was an excellent developping platform for machine controllers because of it's real time OS. But the management of Commodore advertised it as game machine, only, quite successfully at the beginning but there never was a real killer application.
I don't want to do down the achievments of Ada or others who do a great job in showing what can be made possible with the P2. But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
That is of course no excuse for Peter for collecting money and giving nothing in return.
@JonnyMac said:
He seems to have joined the RP2040 community.
I’ve played with the RP2040 a bit and it’s kind of cool. It isn’t nearly as powerful as the P2 though. However, it is a lot cheaper and easier to prototype at least if you use the Raspberry Pi Pico module. Is there something like the Pico for the P2?
@ManAtWork said:
I don't want to do down the achievments of Ada or others who do a great job in showing what can be made possible with the P2. But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
I mean, define Real Application. My emulator nonsense is finished(kinda) software one can download/compile/run right now that fulfills some chosen goal in a semi-novel way. Sure, that chosen goal is a bit silly, but so am I.
That is of course no excuse for Peter for collecting money and giving nothing in return.
@JonnyMac said:
He seems to have joined the RP2040 community.
I’ve played with the RP2040 a bit and it’s kind of cool. It isn’t nearly as powerful as the P2 though. However, it is a lot cheaper and easier to prototype at least if you use the Raspberry Pi Pico module. Is there something like the Pico for the P2?
It is kind of neat -- another tool in the box. The DEF CON 30 badge used the RP2040, and I picked up another badge that used it, too. Like others, I have used the P2 in a "real applications." JonyJib has a new camera platform control product that uses a P2 in the base controller and another in the remote head controller. It's starting to gain real traction with JJs customers. Next week I will start porting the P1 laser tag code to the P2. That's a "real application" that sells thousands of units every year. For a very small laser tag accessory, I used an ESP32. For another low-feature, cost-constrained project I am considering the RP2040. The Propeller is my favorite (and preferred) tool, but not my only tool.
What I don't understand about Peter apparently walking way is that he pushed Chip to include his Forth engine in the P2 silicon, and he advocated for the odd SPI connections that have the flash and [standard] SD sharing only four pins by playing games with CS definitions (which I find highly irritating). I can live without the $75 I sent via PayPal.
Forth you need to fight, if there is no fight, forth is not needed. That's the fate of forth and the fade of forth. I hopefully will use forth the time to come intensively and, yes, Peter's engagement can not be weighted by money so if he missed a personal goal, it should be easier for us to survive than for him. I'll try to use forth-Tachyon on the P2 and forth 8th on the PC and my goal is to fuse them together.
What I don't understand about Peter apparently walking way is that he pushed Chip to include his Forth engine in the P2 silicon, and he advocated for the odd SPI connections that have the flash and [standard] SD sharing only four pins by playing games with CS definitions (which I find highly irritating).
I’m afraid I may be at last partially responsible for Tachyon ending up in the P2 ROM. Chip asked for ideas of what to put in there and I encouraged Peter to talk to him about Tachyon because I thought it would be useful to have a language built in rather than just a simple command interpreter.
I didn’t have anything to do with the pin sharing though. That sounded ugly to me but I guess it was done to save dedicated pins.
The pin sharing is highly irritating indeed. To make it work it requires that infernal throughput-killing resistor on the SD card data line.
Yay for a single saved pin (vs a normal SPI bus with two selects).
Then again, the SD bootloader is nice on paper but in an actual end-user product you wouldn't use it because there is no way for it to error out to the user. So you need flash after all, even if just to store a fancier bootloader. And the dev boards have flash to begin with.
But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
One of the great difficulties in assessing the 'real application' uptake of the P2 from the forum posts is that those projects are more likely to be geared toward a profit making enterprise, and therefore are less likely to be discussed much (if at all) in the forum.
On the other hand the retro-computing stuff, being much more likely to be hobby related, is much more open to public discussion.
I don't have a solution to this problem; I'm just noting the explanation for the disparity in discussion.
@AJL said:
One of the great difficulties in assessing the 'real application' uptake of the P2 from the forum posts is that those projects are more likely to be geared toward a profit making enterprise, and therefore are less likely to be discussed much (if at all) in the forum.
On the other hand the retro-computing stuff, being much more likely to be hobby related, is much more open to public discussion.
I wish Peter well and can live without the $75, but I do think Parallax's adoption of Tachyon Forth was a mistake.
While I dearly love my HP calculator, I don't naturally think in Reverse Polish Notation and I don't think many others do. I also think that adopting an obscure and difficult write-only language from the 1970's ** could easily have resulted in the Propeller 2 being dismissed by the mainstream as a bit of a cult oddity.
Fortunately, it is barely visible in the documentation and you never actually need to use it.
** Yes, I am being partly ironic here - but at least C is still widespread and has an official specification!
But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
One of the great difficulties in assessing the 'real application' uptake of the P2 from the forum posts is that those projects are more likely to be geared toward a profit making enterprise, and therefore are less likely to be discussed much (if at all) in the forum.
On the other hand the retro-computing stuff, being much more likely to be hobby related, is much more open to public discussion.
I don't have a solution to this problem; I'm just noting the explanation for the disparity in discussion.
I'm gauging the uptake by the stock levels at Digikey, Mouser, RS, etc. and they've hardly budged.
@RossH said:
I wish Peter well and can live without the $75, but I do think Parallax's adoption of Tachyon Forth was a mistake.
While I dearly love my HP calculator, I don't naturally think in Reverse Polish Notation and I don't think many others do. I also think that adopting an obscure and difficult write-only language from the 1970's ** could easily have resulted in the Propeller 2 being dismissed by the mainstream as a bit of a cult oddity.
Fortunately, it is barely visible in the documentation and you never actually need to use it.
** Yes, I am being partly ironic here - but at least C is still widespread and has an official specification!
Writing as a user of that obscure Tachyon Forth:
The problems of the builtin version are, that there is no proper docu and that Peter kept Tachyon changing, so that Peter did not encourage to use the builtin version. And without Bob's docu, the last version would be nearly worthless.
In my experience the problem, when Forth was not readable, is solved when you use normal source files, which give room for structured writing, instead of small screens and if you use local variables.
In my opinion the scattered docu of P2 and the focus on Spin2 instead of C are the biggest problems for professional usage.
For makers, additionally the edge board format is incomplete, hard to use and too expensive, because of it's low volume production methods.
It seems to be highly unfair to blame Peter for anything, when he had some free software available in the tight time slice to be included in the free rom space.
@"Christof Eb." said:
It seems to be highly unfair to blame Peter for anything, when he had some free software available in the tight time slice to be included in the free rom space.
I wasn't criticizing Peter. I was criticizing Parallax. They make great products, but they also seem to have a talent for shooting themselves in the foot!
We should calm down! In a world of alternative facts and special operations and earnest people asking for nuclear power we should be happy that people like gathered in this forum do exist at all and still! Many here I just admire as they consequently follow a path they imagine and do not look around. So in some way they are alone and we are just a part of the party. To me the best decision made was to include Tachyon into the ROM as I know it will multiply my abilities if only I find time to care about it. And Bob's lonly work: Please keep going!
The hopefully never ending story of the Px has seen many hurdles and when you accidently open a valve and your turbo pump is gone, so much is lossed, that the few bugs we invested in our dreams (and Peters) do not count.
But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
One of the great difficulties in assessing the 'real application' uptake of the P2 from the forum posts is that those projects are more likely to be geared toward a profit making enterprise, and therefore are less likely to be discussed much (if at all) in the forum.
On the other hand the retro-computing stuff, being much more likely to be hobby related, is much more open to public discussion.
I don't have a solution to this problem; I'm just noting the explanation for the disparity in discussion.
I'm gauging the uptake by the stock levels at Digikey, Mouser, RS, etc. and they've hardly budged.
Craig
Fair enough, but my comment was in relation to @ManAtWork 's comment that dealt specifically with the forum.
I have a not retro, "real P2 thing" which is autonomic UVC COVID disinfecting robot family developed by our university team.
And yes, the documentation needs to be finished and cleaned up, and then Flexprop should be adopted as an official programming tool for a P2. At least it contains C, and it has a good dialect of Basic. In my experience Spin is not suitable for any bigger project. For a P1, the chip itself limits the code size with its 32 kB of RAM so there is no problem with Spin oversized code there. P2 allows to write much bigger things: I have this robot control program written in Spin, 4000 lines of code and still a lot of HUB RAM free.
Now, after the planned milestones are reached, the next step will be to rewrite all the program in Basic. I already did it for another robot in the family, reducing 3500 lines of Spin to about 1000 lines of easy readable Basic code much easier to manage.
The Flexprop's C still needs a double floating point support to make existing C code software easier to port. A library format and ability to link a precompiled library may be also important (if it is not already there, I am not sure).
The RP2040 got Arduino IDE support. This opened a lot of new possibities for this chip. Maybe an effort should be made to add P2 board support for Arduino IDE, it has a lot of users. Then, the Arduino/Pico/RPi standalone style board for a P2 is also needed. Edge is good, but it needs a breakout, and Eval+accessories is too expensive for "everyday user".
The flash/SD interface is dangerous. I managed to "unformat" the SD while experimenting with the flash. The tip: this flash is high frequency capable, don't use 2 MHz (as it was in the existing example - it should be updated too) - use at least 20 MHz for the clock. 2 MHz clock was low enough to make a mounted SD react to and overwrite its sector 0 with garbage.
@Wuerfel_21 said:
I mean, define Real Application. My emulator nonsense is finished(kinda) software one can download/compile/run right now that fulfills some chosen goal in a semi-novel way. Sure, that chosen goal is a bit silly, but so am I.
Well, the term "real application" came from @hinv quoting Peter Jakacki in post #62. I just copied that. I think he meant "profitable application" which enables the creator making money from it or Parallax selling more chips or both.
Again, I've never meant to criticize anyone or anything. In fact I'm a bit jalous about how you can afford spending so much time on non-profit projects. I tend to be too busy all the time and can only dream of spending the whole day experimenting with the P2. But that's my own fault and if I'm not happy I have to change something by myself instead of blaming others.
And of course, games and even pure "demos" can also be a "real application". First, education is nothing else but demonstrating how things work. I think Parallax makes a larger part of their money in the education sector. Second, a friend of mine makes a living from selling Amiga clones. I'd also call that a "real application" although most of his customers use it only for games or even never power it up but use it as a pure display item on the shelf next to their old Amiga computer.
But to call it "real" or better "successful" aplication it has to reach a larger group of users. So I'm not worried about the quality of the forum content. But we shouldn't make the mistake to design amazing things for a very limited circle of "geeks".
Comments
Yeah, he has a youtube channel. On this video someone commented:
to which his response was over a month later:
So he's not using bad health as an excuse, but doesn't seem to have any intention to actually produce the P2D2, or refund the people who paid him either, apparently.
How sad.
I hope you guys all get your money back in the end, or some sort of equitable communication and compromise you can reconcile with. It's not nice for anyone when that happens.
Unfortunatelly, there is some truth in his words. I hope the P2 won't suffer t he same fate as the Amiga in the 90s. It was an excellent developping platform for machine controllers because of it's real time OS. But the management of Commodore advertised it as game machine, only, quite successfully at the beginning but there never was a real killer application.
I don't want to do down the achievments of Ada or others who do a great job in showing what can be made possible with the P2. But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
That is of course no excuse for Peter for collecting money and giving nothing in return.
I’ve played with the RP2040 a bit and it’s kind of cool. It isn’t nearly as powerful as the P2 though. However, it is a lot cheaper and easier to prototype at least if you use the Raspberry Pi Pico module. Is there something like the Pico for the P2?
I mean, define Real Application. My emulator nonsense is finished(kinda) software one can download/compile/run right now that fulfills some chosen goal in a semi-novel way. Sure, that chosen goal is a bit silly, but so am I.
Yea what's up with that?
BTW I never collected any money from North American cusomers else I would have refunded already. If anyone payed me indirectly , let me know.
It is kind of neat -- another tool in the box. The DEF CON 30 badge used the RP2040, and I picked up another badge that used it, too. Like others, I have used the P2 in a "real applications." JonyJib has a new camera platform control product that uses a P2 in the base controller and another in the remote head controller. It's starting to gain real traction with JJs customers. Next week I will start porting the P1 laser tag code to the P2. That's a "real application" that sells thousands of units every year. For a very small laser tag accessory, I used an ESP32. For another low-feature, cost-constrained project I am considering the RP2040. The Propeller is my favorite (and preferred) tool, but not my only tool.
What I don't understand about Peter apparently walking way is that he pushed Chip to include his Forth engine in the P2 silicon, and he advocated for the odd SPI connections that have the flash and [standard] SD sharing only four pins by playing games with CS definitions (which I find highly irritating). I can live without the $75 I sent via PayPal.
Forth you need to fight, if there is no fight, forth is not needed. That's the fate of forth and the fade of forth. I hopefully will use forth the time to come intensively and, yes, Peter's engagement can not be weighted by money so if he missed a personal goal, it should be easier for us to survive than for him. I'll try to use forth-Tachyon on the P2 and forth 8th on the PC and my goal is to fuse them together.
@JonnyMac said >
I’m afraid I may be at last partially responsible for Tachyon ending up in the P2 ROM. Chip asked for ideas of what to put in there and I encouraged Peter to talk to him about Tachyon because I thought it would be useful to have a language built in rather than just a simple command interpreter.
I didn’t have anything to do with the pin sharing though. That sounded ugly to me but I guess it was done to save dedicated pins.
The pin sharing is highly irritating indeed. To make it work it requires that infernal throughput-killing resistor on the SD card data line.
Yay for a single saved pin (vs a normal SPI bus with two selects).
Then again, the SD bootloader is nice on paper but in an actual end-user product you wouldn't use it because there is no way for it to error out to the user. So you need flash after all, even if just to store a fancier bootloader. And the dev boards have flash to begin with.
In theory, as long as clock mode 3 is used for both devices, pin contention won't happen - Even when both devices are alternately accessed.
But, yeah, it's easy to sequence the CS controls incorrectly with the clock pins cross purposed.
But I'm somewhat worried about too much retro-computing and too little real applications here in the forum, lately.
One of the great difficulties in assessing the 'real application' uptake of the P2 from the forum posts is that those projects are more likely to be geared toward a profit making enterprise, and therefore are less likely to be discussed much (if at all) in the forum.
On the other hand the retro-computing stuff, being much more likely to be hobby related, is much more open to public discussion.
I don't have a solution to this problem; I'm just noting the explanation for the disparity in discussion.
VERY true.
I wish Peter well and can live without the $75, but I do think Parallax's adoption of Tachyon Forth was a mistake.
While I dearly love my HP calculator, I don't naturally think in Reverse Polish Notation and I don't think many others do. I also think that adopting an obscure and difficult write-only language from the 1970's ** could easily have resulted in the Propeller 2 being dismissed by the mainstream as a bit of a cult oddity.
Fortunately, it is barely visible in the documentation and you never actually need to use it.
** Yes, I am being partly ironic here - but at least C is still widespread and has an official specification!
I would love to know if p2d2 can run NeoYume .
None of my boards can…
I'm gauging the uptake by the stock levels at Digikey, Mouser, RS, etc. and they've hardly budged.
Craig
It seems that the Prop always has been.
Craig
Writing as a user of that obscure Tachyon Forth:
The problems of the builtin version are, that there is no proper docu and that Peter kept Tachyon changing, so that Peter did not encourage to use the builtin version. And without Bob's docu, the last version would be nearly worthless.
In my experience the problem, when Forth was not readable, is solved when you use normal source files, which give room for structured writing, instead of small screens and if you use local variables.
In my opinion the scattered docu of P2 and the focus on Spin2 instead of C are the biggest problems for professional usage.
For makers, additionally the edge board format is incomplete, hard to use and too expensive, because of it's low volume production methods.
It seems to be highly unfair to blame Peter for anything, when he had some free software available in the tight time slice to be included in the free rom space.
I wasn't criticizing Peter. I was criticizing Parallax. They make great products, but they also seem to have a talent for shooting themselves in the foot!
We should calm down! In a world of alternative facts and special operations and earnest people asking for nuclear power we should be happy that people like gathered in this forum do exist at all and still! Many here I just admire as they consequently follow a path they imagine and do not look around. So in some way they are alone and we are just a part of the party. To me the best decision made was to include Tachyon into the ROM as I know it will multiply my abilities if only I find time to care about it. And Bob's lonly work: Please keep going!
The hopefully never ending story of the Px has seen many hurdles and when you accidently open a valve and your turbo pump is gone, so much is lossed, that the few bugs we invested in our dreams (and Peters) do not count.
Fair enough, but my comment was in relation to @ManAtWork 's comment that dealt specifically with the forum.
I have a not retro, "real P2 thing" which is autonomic UVC COVID disinfecting robot family developed by our university team.
And yes, the documentation needs to be finished and cleaned up, and then Flexprop should be adopted as an official programming tool for a P2. At least it contains C, and it has a good dialect of Basic. In my experience Spin is not suitable for any bigger project. For a P1, the chip itself limits the code size with its 32 kB of RAM so there is no problem with Spin oversized code there. P2 allows to write much bigger things: I have this robot control program written in Spin, 4000 lines of code and still a lot of HUB RAM free.
Now, after the planned milestones are reached, the next step will be to rewrite all the program in Basic. I already did it for another robot in the family, reducing 3500 lines of Spin to about 1000 lines of easy readable Basic code much easier to manage.
The Flexprop's C still needs a double floating point support to make existing C code software easier to port. A library format and ability to link a precompiled library may be also important (if it is not already there, I am not sure).
The RP2040 got Arduino IDE support. This opened a lot of new possibities for this chip. Maybe an effort should be made to add P2 board support for Arduino IDE, it has a lot of users. Then, the Arduino/Pico/RPi standalone style board for a P2 is also needed. Edge is good, but it needs a breakout, and Eval+accessories is too expensive for "everyday user".
The flash/SD interface is dangerous. I managed to "unformat" the SD while experimenting with the flash. The tip: this flash is high frequency capable, don't use 2 MHz (as it was in the existing example - it should be updated too) - use at least 20 MHz for the clock. 2 MHz clock was low enough to make a mounted SD react to and overwrite its sector 0 with garbage.
There exists:
KISS, @ManAtWork
Blade, @Cluso99
And hopefully the PGA-style from @knivd
I use the RP2040 as a companion to the Prop but I prefer the PGA2040 version:
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pga2040?variant=39359629656147
Craig
I've plenty of KISS boards in stock ;-)
Please shoot me a price either here or PM (I'm in Lancashire)
How many do you have?
Craig
KISS000 and KISS001 boards in stock for North America delivery also.
Wasn't aware of 2 versions. Is there a big difference?
Craig
KISS001 with SD-Card and USB connector for power
KISS000 without SDC and screw terminals for power
Well, the term "real application" came from @hinv quoting Peter Jakacki in post #62. I just copied that. I think he meant "profitable application" which enables the creator making money from it or Parallax selling more chips or both.
Again, I've never meant to criticize anyone or anything. In fact I'm a bit jalous about how you can afford spending so much time on non-profit projects. I tend to be too busy all the time and can only dream of spending the whole day experimenting with the P2. But that's my own fault and if I'm not happy I have to change something by myself instead of blaming others.
And of course, games and even pure "demos" can also be a "real application". First, education is nothing else but demonstrating how things work. I think Parallax makes a larger part of their money in the education sector. Second, a friend of mine makes a living from selling Amiga clones. I'd also call that a "real application" although most of his customers use it only for games or even never power it up but use it as a pure display item on the shelf next to their old Amiga computer.
But to call it "real" or better "successful" aplication it has to reach a larger group of users. So I'm not worried about the quality of the forum content. But we shouldn't make the mistake to design amazing things for a very limited circle of "geeks".