Mightor said...
I've decided to put my money where my mouth is and start digging around for simple recipes to hook up the following devices to a Prop:
(All are the Parallax sensors as sold on their website)
* Compass module
* Digital wheel encoders
* 2D Tilt meter
* PING))) and Servo
* QTI line sensors
Hopefully the recipes can be added to Oldbitcollector's Prop Cookbook. It may take some time to do all this as I am still learning SPIN atm.
Gr,
Mightor
~ This is not directed at any one person~
well for one thing, i know alot of you just hop-skip and jump to the tutorial on the spin language and miss the part about the manual being geared toward previous microcontroller expierience. Grant it i only tooled around with the BS2 for about a year before hopping on the prop, that lack of experience may have helped me in learning the prop better and faster, it still took a few months to get the swing of parallel proccessing into the veins. and i think Mr M. Mims hasn't produced a book yet on the prop, being only about a yr old now.
I tell you what though, those Forest Mims mini engineer notebooks really self taught me alot about electronics and digital, as well as my investment into Multisim (bye-bye breadboard!)·but discovering that i could take and write about 20 min of code to do what took me hours of breadboarding IC's was a godsend and worth any learning curve!
So you "newbees"·need some more background on electronics engineering, build some audio filter circuits on a breadboard or a gated light flasher and experiment with the components some to see how they affect the circuits. Your patients and experimenting will give you a better understanding of the fundamentals. So interfacing a 5V or even a 12V signal becomes as simple as adding an IRF510 Mosfet to an output, or a 9-10K resistor to an input pin so you can sense a 12V input.
RinksCustoms said...
the "recipies" are objects, which are located in the object exhange, as well as many other sensor interfaces and objects (including a limited set of BS2 functions written in spin), and i think Mr M. Mimms hasn't produced a book yet on the prop, being only about a yr old now.
Yeah, I've been looking through that site and it contains a lot of great info. I intend to just collate the parts for the aforementioned sensors and refer to the articles on the Object Exchange for the actual code. For the recipes I am only really interested in the clear electronic diagrams and perhaps pictures of breadboards with the circuits in question.
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
I agree that people hop-skipping through the documentation and not going through it all is a bad thing. I can only speak for myself and say that I went through all the PDFs pertaining to the Prop that I could find. I am however, and always be, more of a software kind of person. For me, hardware just needs to work and my challenge and fun comes from programming the controller. A small list of electronic diagrams that show you how to hook up the various sensors would prevent disappointment when you accidentally fry an expensive sensor, your controller, or both. I believe that hooking up a sensor to the Propeller should be as straightforward and easy to do as hooking it up the BS2. A good clean electronic diagram with a short explanation about what's happening works very well. This is how the Boe-Bot book is setup and I learned a LOT from that. I wanted to learn to use the Propeller for two reasons: SPIN and the 8 cogs.
I am only planning to make diagrams for the sensors sold by Parallax that I own myself, anything else I would consider out of scope but people are welcome to add their own.
As for simulation software, after having spent most of my spare cash on propeller hardware, I doubt I have any left for that, although I have worked with them when I was doing my electronic engineer course (10+ years ago).
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
Gavin said...
Forest M Mim's notebook guide to the prop?
Nice basic stuff and simple code samples[noparse]:)[/noparse]
Is this an online publication or an actual book? I seem to be unable to find it on Google.
Gr,
Mightor
It was a book of circuits sold by Radio Shack under the Archer brand. My copy of Engineer's Notebook II Integrated Circuit Applications by Forrest M. Mims III sold for $2.49. In those days (circa 1982), you could go to Radio Shack and buy all the chips in the book.
The book's design was based upon 1/4 inch grid ruled notepaper that simulated the careful notes of a talkative engineer. The actual text and schematics look hand drawn, and probably were. But the charm of this presentation made messing around with electronic chips seem easy, fun and accessible.
Today at Radio Shack,·you get a fuzzy brained teenager who hasn't any idea what you could possibly be looking for.
Post Edited (Fred Hawkins) : 8/9/2007 1:04:30 PM GMT
Now that I see the pictures, I remember them. Radio Shack used to operate in Europe under the name 'Tandy'. I had all those books and they were great. I learned a lot from them back then. That was many, many moons ago though and I don't have them anymore.
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
Mightor said...
Now that I see the pictures, I remember them. Radio Shack used to operate in Europe under the name 'Tandy'. I had all those books and they were great. I learned a lot from them back then. That was many, many moons ago though and I don't have them anymore.
I had those too, it's where I learnt about electronics purely as a hobbyist! Happy times.....
I too am a 'newbie' to the prop, we all were at one stage or another, we should remember that.
What strikes me on this forum is that there a lot of talented programmers out there using this great little micro and mostly they are friendly and very helpful.
The greatest thing I have found though is the search engine, it helped me to find almost every example of programming that I needed to complete my first prop project.
And I don't mean the dot net forum search, that is close to useless and unless a 'newbie' knows this it can appear that there is little or no information about the problems that they are looking for.
Surely parallax could change the link on this forum to point to the better search engine.............
What I like to do with a problem is to work through it, be guided along the way if possible, it is by far the best way to learn IMHO.
I'm not overly keen on using things that I don't understand cos when it all goes wrong, where do you look?
Overall, I don't see the need for a beginners sub section, better phrased questions are helpful but of course that depends on the user!!
This forum is a fantastic source and has helped me immensley, but only because I took the time to look, listen and learn.
Those F Mim's notebooks from Tandy (OZ) started me in my electronics career, he made it simple.
I was still using circuits from them 10 yrs later, make that 27rs later, just last week I used a LM338 linear reg to make a micro controlled 5 amp power supply for testing automotive equipment we make. Real ones sell for $20,000+
With the prop I could turn it into a really good power supply waveform tester with video and keyboard programming, well after a bit more practice [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Perhaps we could do the same thing, make an online prop notebook?
Sort of a prop "show me how-to" wiki, with pictures not words.
I wonder how many engineers got started because of Mr Mims?
Perhaps we could do the same thing, make an online prop notebook?
Sort of a prop "show me how-to" wiki, with pictures not words.
I think that would be great! Some explanation of what's going on would be good, though, without getting into too much technical detail, only what is strictly required.
Gavin said...
I wonder how many engineers got started because of Mr Mims?
I started with electronics as a small kid (I think I was about 6 or 7). My dad gave me one of those 105 circuits boxes that Radio Shack sold and I loved it. After a little while most of my pocket money was spent on 555s, 741s and other small components so I could make all the circuits in those little Mims books. After I finished secondary school I went to study EE but I quit after a year because of the sheer amount of calculus. It completely turned me off electronics and I didn't touch it a breadboard for almost 13 years until just a few months ago again [noparse]:)[/noparse]
I would *love* to own a copy of those books again so I can re-learn all my lost electronics knowledge. I did make a missing pulse detector with a 555 the other day and a small circuit to make a LED blink with the 555. Ah good times...
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
About information overload... it is a good source of stress. What we all wish for is the presentation of information in an orderly fashion... exactly matching our intellectual abilites and experience... but we are all different.
If you look at the Propeller and Spin... you can convince yourself that the material could be presented in such a way that a talented 7th grade teacher might be able to use the Prop in an introductory class. The materials aren't targeted to that market yet... but eventually it will happen. Basic questions (asked here) will create a base of materials that others can use to construct such an approach.
At first the question was... "can the Prop be used for teaching a college course?" Next we will see "can the Prop be used to teach electronics to high school students." And finally the question will be... "at what point in the education process can the Prop be used to really stimulate smart kids?" My guess is somewhere around the 6th or 7th grades. The Prop could make it possible to teach high school kids stuff that doesn't get touched now until college.
We live in an electronic world... our kids need to know about electrons and play with them as early in life as possible. I find it unacceptable that 99 percent of the people in our society don't know what happens when they flip a switch.
If we start teaching our kids about the Prop in the 6th or 7th grades ... they will be writing simple games in high school. Everyone looks down at computer games... but in the abstract they are simulation environments with flexible rules of causality... Eventually, our physicists need such talents... building them into their skillsets early...en mass... is one way to ensure that we have an abundant supply of people, capable of simulating physical environments with rules that possibly haven't been discovered yet.
The Prop can lead to all of this... what you are learning may benefit you and others far more than you scarcely imagine.
One way to get the "information overload" to disappear is to pick a project, which is just beyond your current understanding... then try to learn just what is required by your project. That will generate questions...which will generate answers... which will overload someone else... but not you[noparse]:)[/noparse]
I think my main problem at the moment is not having enough knowledge to be able to sift through something like the interfacing 5v thread and being able to pick out what is important and what isn't. Things like capacitors to filter out noise, resistors to pull up, down and sideways and where to put them. Once I get a good enough grasp on things I will be able to make judgment calls on these things, until then, I will need the help from the forums (and Google, of course).
I don't suppose anyone has a (complete) list of the little books that this Mim person published through Radio Shack, do they? That way I can focus my search a little and see if I can find a reseller somewhere a little closer to home (Netherlands), rather than having them shipped from the US [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Edit: Scrap that request, there's too many of them, it would take too long to type it all out [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
You are reporting a common experience. The flip side of the coin is that a person can start almost anywhere... in the available material... or on the forum and automatically bump into something that you know hardly nothing about... but instantly recognize that it is important.
I have had the same problem trying to learn about electronics on my own... then I found the Prop... then I found the forum... and instantly said to myself..."it's all right here!!! All I have to do is organize it... inhale it... and finally I'll get to where I've been trying to go for the past 10 years.
To answer the original question - "How many beginners would like to see a Beginners Sub Section?", I would add myself to the list of those that would like to see a separate forum for those learning programming with the Propeller.
If only to have a place where I don't feel the need to exhaust all other resources before asking a question. As it is now I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out where my errors are - not a bad thing necessarily but I would be further along in my project if I had asked earlier. Although I wouldn't want this new forum to be a place where a question is asked at the first sign of something not working right, even a total newbie should be expected to do some troubleshooting first.
Look to the bottom of the abebooks page, there are links to German, UK and French versions of the site with postage from those locations, I had a quick look at th German site and that has some Forrest Mims books, as does the UK site but I might beat you too those.
mightor... we are way off topic now and I don't want to upset anyone. But it turns out that if Newton had a microprocessor... he wouldn't have needed to invent Calculus... he would have turn the whole thing into a repeat loop... that everyone could understand... And the reason that you probably hated Calculus is because of the symbols... which Babbage did to us.
Now for the really good news... there is a guy who invented a program called Mathematimatica... spent a whole lot of effort so that anyone could do anything with any kind of mathematics... really simply... and after he got all done... he pretty much decided that it was all a waste of time... because if you use mathematics in just about any of those forms... you can't do anything really important with it...
What did he do next?... He invented a different form of mathematicss.... which looks just like the "game of life."
What everyone is doing now is looking for the right seed funciton.
You haven't missed anything... it wasn't worth learning.
Pay attention to the "Game of Life"... it actually is important... and it is coming to your Propeller soon.
If it is Conway's "Game of Life", the first time I ran across this it amazed me it was done by hand initially. Later printed out for each generation on Teletype. Lots of paper and 'earmuffs, please!' Such effort; tiring.
Thanks to personal computers and the graphics they now have.
Fred,
It's a big jump back, but to touch on the issue you raised after Gennady's comment ...
There's a whole year-long course on computer architecture in what you'd like to understand. The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) of which the Propeller is an example goes back to before the first IBM System 360 computers which used the same concepts extensively in their microcode. The design of the CDC 6600 and the Cray computers, particularly their peripheral processors, has some features that look much like the Propeller's hub. Spin borrows a lot of features of early C and C-like languages, before a lot of the standardization stuff.
Thanks for that list [noparse]:)[/noparse] There's a great 2nd hand bookstore in town, I will check if they have at least a few of those.
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
Mike,
I'd bet that there's whole IT degrees here. Doctorates, even.
I based my list (Hub memory, cog registers/memory, separate cogs, idiosyncratic opcodes, constants and variables between cogs, timing issues, spin/assembly relations) on the recurring themes of beginner posts here. IMHO a decent introduction that not merely lays out the details but also discusses their implications could help beginners. Though its writing would likely be more useful than its reading. As ever.
I've never been a fan of RISC, or Intel, or little-endianess, or (dread) C, or object oriented anything. I like Forth and assembly on a cordial chip. My hardware 'skills' are as arkane -- high frequency transmitters circa 1970 (tubes! pentodes, septodes, the circuit is on because it glows...), relays and motors a bit later, and randomly acquired ic understanding. That's my bias.
Others have a different take on stuff. Writing an introduction for me would be tough, writing a good one everyone is probably impossible.
But on the other hand, I think nearly every savant here could write at least two pages on each part of that list. An omibus of those writings may even be entertaining and worthwhile.
Comments
well for one thing, i know alot of you just hop-skip and jump to the tutorial on the spin language and miss the part about the manual being geared toward previous microcontroller expierience. Grant it i only tooled around with the BS2 for about a year before hopping on the prop, that lack of experience may have helped me in learning the prop better and faster, it still took a few months to get the swing of parallel proccessing into the veins. and i think Mr M. Mims hasn't produced a book yet on the prop, being only about a yr old now.
I tell you what though, those Forest Mims mini engineer notebooks really self taught me alot about electronics and digital, as well as my investment into Multisim (bye-bye breadboard!)·but discovering that i could take and write about 20 min of code to do what took me hours of breadboarding IC's was a godsend and worth any learning curve!
So you "newbees"·need some more background on electronics engineering, build some audio filter circuits on a breadboard or a gated light flasher and experiment with the components some to see how they affect the circuits. Your patients and experimenting will give you a better understanding of the fundamentals. So interfacing a 5V or even a 12V signal becomes as simple as adding an IRF510 Mosfet to an output, or a 9-10K resistor to an input pin so you can sense a 12V input.
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E3 = Thought
http://folding.stanford.edu/·- Donating some CPU/GPU downtime just might lead to a cure for cancer! My team stats.
Post Edited (RinksCustoms) : 8/9/2007 7:33:48 AM GMT
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
. . . . . . . . . . . . .· .· .·· .· .·· . .··|
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E3 = Thought
http://folding.stanford.edu/·- Donating some CPU/GPU downtime just might lead to a cure for cancer! My team stats.
I am only planning to make diagrams for the sensors sold by Parallax that I own myself, anything else I would consider out of scope but people are welcome to add their own.
As for simulation software, after having spent most of my spare cash on propeller hardware, I doubt I have any left for that, although I have worked with them when I was doing my electronic engineer course (10+ years ago).
Gr,
Mightor
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
The book's design was based upon 1/4 inch grid ruled notepaper that simulated the careful notes of a talkative engineer. The actual text and schematics look hand drawn, and probably were. But the charm of this presentation made messing around with electronic chips seem easy, fun and accessible.
Today at Radio Shack,·you get a fuzzy brained teenager who hasn't any idea what you could possibly be looking for.
Post Edited (Fred Hawkins) : 8/9/2007 1:04:30 PM GMT
Gr,
Mightor
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
I had those too, it's where I learnt about electronics purely as a hobbyist! Happy times.....
I too am a 'newbie' to the prop, we all were at one stage or another, we should remember that.
What strikes me on this forum is that there a lot of talented programmers out there using this great little micro and mostly they are friendly and very helpful.
The greatest thing I have found though is the search engine, it helped me to find almost every example of programming that I needed to complete my first prop project.
And I don't mean the dot net forum search, that is close to useless and unless a 'newbie' knows this it can appear that there is little or no information about the problems that they are looking for.
Surely parallax could change the link on this forum to point to the better search engine.............
What I like to do with a problem is to work through it, be guided along the way if possible, it is by far the best way to learn IMHO.
I'm not overly keen on using things that I don't understand cos when it all goes wrong, where do you look?
Overall, I don't see the need for a beginners sub section, better phrased questions are helpful but of course that depends on the user!!
This forum is a fantastic source and has helped me immensley, but only because I took the time to look, listen and learn.
Just my two pence worth lol
Regards,
Coley
I remember them - still have them all, somewhere.
I was still using circuits from them 10 yrs later, make that 27rs later, just last week I used a LM338 linear reg to make a micro controlled 5 amp power supply for testing automotive equipment we make. Real ones sell for $20,000+
With the prop I could turn it into a really good power supply waveform tester with video and keyboard programming, well after a bit more practice [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Perhaps we could do the same thing, make an online prop notebook?
Sort of a prop "show me how-to" wiki, with pictures not words.
I wonder how many engineers got started because of Mr Mims?
I started with electronics as a small kid (I think I was about 6 or 7). My dad gave me one of those 105 circuits boxes that Radio Shack sold and I loved it. After a little while most of my pocket money was spent on 555s, 741s and other small components so I could make all the circuits in those little Mims books. After I finished secondary school I went to study EE but I quit after a year because of the sheer amount of calculus. It completely turned me off electronics and I didn't touch it a breadboard for almost 13 years until just a few months ago again [noparse]:)[/noparse]
I would *love* to own a copy of those books again so I can re-learn all my lost electronics knowledge. I did make a missing pulse detector with a 555 the other day and a small circuit to make a LED blink with the 555. Ah good times...
Gr,
Mightor
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
Graham
About information overload... it is a good source of stress. What we all wish for is the presentation of information in an orderly fashion... exactly matching our intellectual abilites and experience... but we are all different.
If you look at the Propeller and Spin... you can convince yourself that the material could be presented in such a way that a talented 7th grade teacher might be able to use the Prop in an introductory class. The materials aren't targeted to that market yet... but eventually it will happen. Basic questions (asked here) will create a base of materials that others can use to construct such an approach.
At first the question was... "can the Prop be used for teaching a college course?" Next we will see "can the Prop be used to teach electronics to high school students." And finally the question will be... "at what point in the education process can the Prop be used to really stimulate smart kids?" My guess is somewhere around the 6th or 7th grades. The Prop could make it possible to teach high school kids stuff that doesn't get touched now until college.
We live in an electronic world... our kids need to know about electrons and play with them as early in life as possible. I find it unacceptable that 99 percent of the people in our society don't know what happens when they flip a switch.
If we start teaching our kids about the Prop in the 6th or 7th grades ... they will be writing simple games in high school. Everyone looks down at computer games... but in the abstract they are simulation environments with flexible rules of causality... Eventually, our physicists need such talents... building them into their skillsets early...en mass... is one way to ensure that we have an abundant supply of people, capable of simulating physical environments with rules that possibly haven't been discovered yet.
The Prop can lead to all of this... what you are learning may benefit you and others far more than you scarcely imagine.
One way to get the "information overload" to disappear is to pick a project, which is just beyond your current understanding... then try to learn just what is required by your project. That will generate questions...which will generate answers... which will overload someone else... but not you[noparse]:)[/noparse]
Rich
I think my main problem at the moment is not having enough knowledge to be able to sift through something like the interfacing 5v thread and being able to pick out what is important and what isn't. Things like capacitors to filter out noise, resistors to pull up, down and sideways and where to put them. Once I get a good enough grasp on things I will be able to make judgment calls on these things, until then, I will need the help from the forums (and Google, of course).
I don't suppose anyone has a (complete) list of the little books that this Mim person published through Radio Shack, do they? That way I can focus my search a little and see if I can find a reseller somewhere a little closer to home (Netherlands), rather than having them shipped from the US [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Edit: Scrap that request, there's too many of them, it would take too long to type it all out [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
Post Edited (Mightor) : 8/9/2007 4:55:26 PM GMT
You are reporting a common experience. The flip side of the coin is that a person can start almost anywhere... in the available material... or on the forum and automatically bump into something that you know hardly nothing about... but instantly recognize that it is important.
I have had the same problem trying to learn about electronics on my own... then I found the Prop... then I found the forum... and instantly said to myself..."it's all right here!!! All I have to do is organize it... inhale it... and finally I'll get to where I've been trying to go for the past 10 years.
ILMP (I love my Prop)
Rich
If only to have a place where I don't feel the need to exhaust all other resources before asking a question. As it is now I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out where my errors are - not a bad thing necessarily but I would be further along in my project if I had asked earlier. Although I wouldn't want this new forum to be a place where a question is asked at the first sign of something not working right, even a total newbie should be expected to do some troubleshooting first.
Look to the bottom of the abebooks page, there are links to German, UK and French versions of the site with postage from those locations, I had a quick look at th German site and that has some Forrest Mims books, as does the UK site but I might beat you too those.
Graham
Now for the really good news... there is a guy who invented a program called Mathematimatica... spent a whole lot of effort so that anyone could do anything with any kind of mathematics... really simply... and after he got all done... he pretty much decided that it was all a waste of time... because if you use mathematics in just about any of those forms... you can't do anything really important with it...
What did he do next?... He invented a different form of mathematicss.... which looks just like the "game of life."
What everyone is doing now is looking for the right seed funciton.
You haven't missed anything... it wasn't worth learning.
Pay attention to the "Game of Life"... it actually is important... and it is coming to your Propeller soon.
Rich
If it is Conway's "Game of Life", the first time I ran across this it amazed me it was done by hand initially. Later printed out for each generation on Teletype. Lots of paper and 'earmuffs, please!' Such effort; tiring.
Thanks to personal computers and the graphics they now have.
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Harley Shanko
h.a.s. designn
But in terms of pure significance... that is one hell of a significant game.
It's a big jump back, but to touch on the issue you raised after Gennady's comment ...
There's a whole year-long course on computer architecture in what you'd like to understand. The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) of which the Propeller is an example goes back to before the first IBM System 360 computers which used the same concepts extensively in their microcode. The design of the CDC 6600 and the Cray computers, particularly their peripheral processors, has some features that look much like the Propeller's hub. Spin borrows a lot of features of early C and C-like languages, before a lot of the standardization stuff.
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Whit+
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
I just happen to have many of them stacked up in a neat pile on my workbench. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Here's what I have...
Engineers Mini-Notebook Enviromental Projects 62-5019
Engineers Mini-Notebook Schematic Symbols, Device Packages Design and Testing 276-5017
Engineers Mini-Notebook Optoelectronics 276-5012
Engineers Mini-Notebook Digital Logic Circuits 62-5014
Engineers Mini-Notebook 555 Timer IC Circuits 276-5010a
Engineers Mini-Notebook Science Projects 276-5018a
Engineers Mini-Notebook Op Amp IC Circuits 276-5011a
Engineers Mini-Notebook Formulas, Tables and Basic Circuits 276-5016a
Engineers Mini-Notebook Communications Projects 276-5015a
Engineers Mini-Notebook Basic Semiconductor Circuits 276-5013a
Hope that helps your search..
Oldbitcollector
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The comments and code above are proof that a million monkeys with a million propeller chips *could* write Shakespeare!
Thanks for that list [noparse]:)[/noparse] There's a great 2nd hand bookstore in town, I will check if they have at least a few of those.
Gr,
Mightor
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| What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
| "Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my fist of death tingling?"
| - Alice from Dilbert
I'd bet that there's whole IT degrees here. Doctorates, even.
I based my list (Hub memory, cog registers/memory, separate cogs, idiosyncratic opcodes, constants and variables between cogs, timing issues, spin/assembly relations) on the recurring themes of beginner posts here. IMHO a decent introduction that not merely lays out the details but also discusses their implications could help beginners. Though its writing would likely be more useful than its reading. As ever.
I've never been a fan of RISC, or Intel, or little-endianess, or (dread) C, or object oriented anything. I like Forth and assembly on a cordial chip. My hardware 'skills' are as arkane -- high frequency transmitters circa 1970 (tubes! pentodes, septodes, the circuit is on because it glows...), relays and motors a bit later, and randomly acquired ic understanding. That's my bias.
Others have a different take on stuff. Writing an introduction for me would be tough, writing a good one everyone is probably impossible.
But on the other hand, I think nearly every savant here could write at least two pages on each part of that list. An omibus of those writings may even be entertaining and worthwhile.
Fred