PropStick Works; What Now?

EdKirk

Hi,
I have dusted off my old, old Radio Shack TV monitor and connected its video cable to pin A13 on my brandnew PropStick, run
''*****************************
''* TV Terminal Demo v1.0 *
''* (C) 2004 Parallax, Inc. *
''*****************************
Successfully! The title line is 'greeked' but I am willing to ignore that for now.
The digits are all displayed correctly.

Pressing F10 on the IDE loads and runs that program just fine. What do I do now?
Anything else I run destroys that display. Trying to get to Debug_PC or something like it.

I see that some of the sample programs have readme.txt that shows a hierchy; I have no idea how to use that info.·

Fer instance when I press F10 in the IDE the current software is loaded into ram and executed.· The reset button on the PropStick will execute again.· Has all the previous ram been erased?· Can I load another cog without destroying the one I have previously loaded?

How do I link one .spin with another?· Is that a nonsense question?· I have used·the dot to link·objects in Pascal; how do they work here in spin?

Is this linking done by me in the text editor?

That is what I meant by "What do I do·now?"

EdKirk



Post Edited By Moderator (Jon Williams (Parallax)) : 5/10/2006 12:18:19 AM GMT

FORD

I suggest that you go through the projects in the thread here...

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=574524

It gives you some step by step basics which gradually get you deeper into it, rather than starting with a fairly involved program like the TV demo.

Other than that, I think we are all looking forward to the tutorial being released.

Cheers,
Chris

EdKirk

Chris,

I did a very poor job of posing my quesiton. I has been through those programs as you suggest. Igave up on those that used and LCD because I do not have one of those.

I have been able to understand those I did study well enough to modify them to change pin numbers to those I had connected to 10 leds, change flashing frequencies, and I generated my own pause procedure (function) in one of them to reduce the typing required to alter the time periods.

I did modify the simultaneous flashing using two cogs so that they finished at the same time. There it was clear that the two programs in the two cogs were downloaded to my PropStick at the same time from the same edited file. From this 'everybody knows' how to load two procedures -- except me.

I think I am ready to find out what is going on inside my chip. I speculated that it may be possible to get the debug data back to my PC and thence to its monitor, but I did not discover how. I recall that this how the Stamps worked when the Debug command was in the list.

That is why I am trying to apply my video monitor.

One of my questions is valid. Must the Popeller chip always be reload from scratch, or can various parts be loaded one by one?

Is the best way to combine two procedures in to the chip to first combine them in the editor?

EdKirk

Jon Williams

One Spin object (the topmost is called the "Top Object") can use the PUBlic methods of any object that it declares as part of its OBJ block.· If, for example, I want to connect a Parallax Serial LCD to my Propeller and I need numeric formatting too, I would use the Debug_LCD object, like this:

OBJ

· lcd : "debug_lcd"

Cha-ching, once I start that object (it has a .start method), I can send data (even formatted numbers) to the LCD without hassle.· So, that's how you link a couple Spin programs.· If you dig into Debug_LCD you'll see that it uses the Simple_Numbers object to handle formatting chores.

I know that many coming from BASIC Stamp controllers will need to get used to breaking up their projects into useful parts; in the end, though, this will save a lot of typing (or Copy-and-Paste) and improve productivity.

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax

EdKirk

Jon,

Thanks for your susinct reply! You have made short work of coming to the crux of my puzzlement.

Does that one OBJ line in my edit file cause my computer to search for the appropriate file and include it in the compilation without my having to cut and paste it?

If so in what directory must that source file be placed? Does it have to be listed in the navigation list at the upper left of the IDE?

EdKirk

Jon Williams

Yes, you can think of OBJ as a special form of INCLUDE -- the IDE will search the current directory or the Propeller Library folder for the file. Note that you can also include information in the DAT block.

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax