Parallax shows Propeller at ESC in San Jose, CA

Ken Gracey

Hello Prop users,

This week we showed the Propeller at the Embedded Systems Conference. Many visitors had already heard of the Propeller and·others (especially those·active on·this forum) were already using the·chip.

We gave away around 50 Propeller kits.

We had three different tables for demonstrations at the show. From left to right we had Propeller displays. Paul Baker showed off a nice user-interface consisting of multiple demos with sound, display, and a variety of human interfaces. Chip showed off·the IDE and a collection of his favorite programs that included singing monks, neat displays with gears, numbers, scope signals and mouse pointers. David and I showed off the hybrid robot and allowed the guests to drive it around.·A wireless link to another Propeller showed the·robot's six·Ping·sensors on a monitor. Andre' LaMothe·demonstrated the Hydra·Game System.·The graphics were impressive and I noticed several new games had been developed since he last provided a demonstration. Chuck demonstrated some of Beau's metal sensors with a small display. Beau·is very·skilled at·building and programming·the metal detector sensors.

I think the customer reception exceeded our expectations. Some visitors have a block towards something so different from what they're used to, whereas others couldn't wait to get their hands on the Propeller and cited it as the most exciting invention at the show.

Al Gore provided they keynote speech at ESC. The Orange County Chopper guys were there to show off the new "Intel" chopper.

Thanks for the visits from our forum members.·It's·a lot·of fun for us to connect the faces with names.

I'm sorry I didn't provide more pictures of higher quality. We were simply too busy.

Sincerely,

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.



Post Edited (Ken Gracey (Parallax)) : 4/6/2007 7:53:17 PM GMT

Ken Gracey

Second set of pictures are in this message.

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

Ken Gracey

Third set of pictures are in this message.

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

Post Edited (Ken Gracey (Parallax)) : 4/6/2007 7:55:14 PM GMT

Mike Green

Could Chip's multi-demo be made available (for demonstrations)?

BTX

Congratulations for you !!!!!

I'm so sorry, to can't be there. I hope could be anytime !! I'm giving you, a good number of new propeller funs from my country.

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Regards.

Alberto.

Ken Gracey

Mike,

Absolutely. I just talked with Chip and he'll post his demo. David will post the robot programs. Paul's demo relied on an SD Card, so it may be less useful due to this hardware requirement but I'll ask him as well.

Alberto, thanks! We will always be able to point to you as being a Propeller pioneer in Argentina. The only other Propeller programmer in Argentina is the father of our Education Manager Aristides Alvarez, who is also named Aristides Alvarez (Ari Grande).

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

QuattroRS4

Hope OCC picked up on the Propellers prowess and plan to make a Prop bike soon...

Well done to all..

btw: - I love the sign 'to return to the main menu -Press the Reset Button'!!!

Regards,
Quattro

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'Necessity is the mother of invention'

Post Edited (QuattroRS4) : 4/6/2007 8:06:04 PM GMT

Paul Baker

Here is the bundle, the kiosk code is a bit rough around the edges and scantily documented because it was never written specifically to be released (and I developed it in 2 weeks time). The files DEMOA.BIN through DEMOM.BIN were located on the root directory of an SD card formated for fat16 and wired to pins 0-4 of the propeller in the order of DO, CLK, DI and CS respectively.

PHat bitmaps are for an animated·Propeller logo that I ran out of time to implement.

DEMOB.BIN is the binary image of Chip's newest VGA demo sans the simultaneous TV output, which he threw in there a few minutes before the show started.

Word of warning, if you click on any of the demos and you do not have them loaded and connected properly, the Propeller will hang.

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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer

Parallax, Inc.

cgracey

Here is the demo program we used at the Embedded Systems Conference. It was just thrown together, so it's pretty sloppy. It outputs 1280x1024 VGA, TV, and inputs a mouse. It works with the Propeller Demo Board.

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Chip Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

nutson

I have downloaded both demo programs, and they·run without·problems. Thanks!

Nico·

Tracy Allen

Live from Silicon Valley... Here are a few observations of the show...

There was a terrific snafu with the badge printers in the registration areas. All 4 of them down and out, and a hundred engineers waiting. Can anyone figure this out? My fault for forgetting my preprinted badge at home.

That is why I arrived late to Al Gore's keynote. He was talking about a vision for the future that depends on sparking the interest of young people in technology (for good), and he was challenging the participants in silicon valley to do that. Big ovation for the great man. He was headed up to SF to give another talk, on climate.

I went from the keynote directly over to the Prius teardown, which was a dissapointment. I did enjoy looking inside with all the upholstery torn out and the cables and panels hanging loose. But the talk was by outsiders (not Toyota engineers or enthusiasts), mostly a matter of pointing out chips on circuit boards, not how it works. There were lot of options on separate circuit boards, extra to pay for when you buy the car, and lots of CPUs for different functions. I'd been wanting to hear about how the 200+ volts from the NiMH battery stack is turned into AC to drive the electric motor. Magic sinewaves? Still wondering.

Then I crossed from one end of the convention center to the other to visit with Parallax. Their booth is always a highlight. "Remember when programming was fun?" was printed large on the booth and the whole tenor of the setup would seem to fit right in there with the Gore speech. The demos were lively and the booth were very approachable, and there were always people around talking to the staff. (Some of the booths at these shows are kind of stuffy or even intimidating!) I didn't get to talk with everybody there. I did meet forum members there, to connect faces with names. It was nice to see Bob Blick again, who many of you will remember from early days on the forum, and to have a chance to talk with Cam Thompson of Micromega and author of the floating point package.

In the rest of the show, there was a lot to see, almost an excess of audio/visual/hypno stimulation. We were drooling over an oscilloscope/protocol analyzer from LeCroy. $$$$ of course. National Instruments had several demos, one with a robot arm with a Ping))) and a Taos color sensor, that would grab colored cyclinders that you could stand up on a table, and move them back and put them back in a tray sorted by color. Lots of "solutions". That was a watch word there. Connectivity solutions. Software solutions. System integration solutions. Disk drives on shaker tables. The Avnet booth had most hardened computer I have ever seen, the Black Diamond Switchback. That is used as the dashboard controller for the Intel Orange County Chopper. Works even underwater and i/o function can be customized with a backback. It uses a Celeron, although a lot of the Intel literature is talking about the 4 core Xeon. Finally, after talking about it with the Avnet rep, we decided to go over to see the chopper at the Intel talk. However, that turned out to be a hideously boring talk about Intel's market position, and every once in a while they would play the sound of the chopper over the speakers to wake everyone up. We had to leave to miss the rush hour traffic, before the real deal came out.

Anyhow, it was well worth the trip to meet the folks from Parallax and friends.

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Tracy Allen
www.emesystems.com

jamma

The ESC was a lot of fun. Lots of goodies on display and the Al Gore speech was quite inspiring (and I·didn't really have·strong feelings for·Gore·either way·going in). It was great to meet other forum members and some of the Parallax crew. Ken, Chip, & Paul are as nice, down to earth, and smart in person as they are on the forums. It really is a special company, and, to amplify something Tracy said, it's one of the few helping to inspire the next generation of engineers who will be tasked with solving all manner of important problems (Gore's vision includes micro-generators such as home-based solar systems that feed into a vastly improved grid when not drawing from it).

-- Sean


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ALIBE

very cool stuff - thanks for the post - am able to put "face to name"

caio

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"any small object, accidentally dropped, goes and hides behind a larger object."

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ALIBE - Artificial LIfe BEing. In search of building autonoumous land robot
http://ALIBE.crosscity.com/
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