What about a new Parallax P2 Product?

Christof Eb.

There is a great opportunity, for Parallax to offer a new compact board:

• Have a WLAN+Bluetooth module on board
• Have functionality of the prop plug onboard. Sorry, the prop plug just adds cost for the customer and fiddling.
• Have one 4bit SPI Ram on board, that's 8MB I think
• Have a larger 4bit SPI Flash on board
• Have micro-SD card holder on board.
• Have power supply for up to 12V or via USB-C on board. Good S/R 3V3 for at least one group of pins for audio.
• Have one LED at a port pin or perhaps better a neopixel.
• Have directly bread board friendly pinout. If it is not possible to bring out all pins, just omit a few. If it is not possible to have the width bread board friendly, we will use 2 bread bords in parallel. Sorry, the adapters needed for the current board just add cost and fiddling for the customers.

In my opinion this board is NOT intended for retro gaming but would be great for example for robots. So overclocking is NOT mandatory here for HDMI.

Reason to write this, is that I recently bought some Pico2W and I am thinking, that a combination of strengths would really be great. WLAN is soooo good to connect to a device like a robot or whatever! And multiple cores can often be soooo more simple to use. It is nice to have a compact setup for use in robots.

I think that today there is still a time gap open, where the P2 8-core machine can shine for many applications!

Of course an attractive price tag is necessary to sell things.

@"Ken Gracey" and others, what do you think?
Cheers Christof

rogloh

@"Christof Eb." said:
Of course an attractive price tag is necessary to sell things.

What's an attractive price tag for you given the above features?

Mickster

I prefer the KISS module approach; add only what you need.

My preferred approach is to use the precious resources of the Prop for time critical stuff.

An RPi Pico is dirt cheap for a front-end. MMBasic just keeps getting better (HDMI, USB keyboard, mouse, etc.)

ESP32 for comm's: BT, WiFi, Lora, ESP-NOW, Ethernet.

Christof Eb.

@rogloh said:

@"Christof Eb." said:
Of course an attractive price tag is necessary to sell things.

What's an attractive price tag for you given the above features?

Hi,
of course a difficult question.
One possibility seems to do a comparison, what US Companies can offer
Let's start with a DaisySeed ARM7 Module 25,20 including 65MB RAM, covers production of the board
let's add the full price of a single P2 17.95 for margin
and throw in a Photon2 board which covers WLAN and the bigger area of the PCB 6,-
That's 49,- for a board, that can be used directly.
The ARM7 is not needed, so I think <=45,- should be possible too.

It seems to be reasonable, that the board should be not more expensive than Arduino Q. In Europe that's 48Euro.
Cheers Christof