New guy with stupid questions

Brian_the_Nerd

All,

Hello! I'm new here and I had a few questions that I'm sure have been answered over and over again here in this forum. I have an electrical engineering background (college) and I really loved programming in assembler. It wasn't until I was out of school and looking for Microcontrollers that I stumbled across the whole BASIC Stamp world. I know VERY little about BASIC stamp and have never written any code or assembled one piece of BASIC Stamp hardware. I've played with the Motorola 6800 series uP/controllers, Zylog, Phillips and even a little Intel. Very basic (no pun intended) stuff nothing fancy. The problem with those is the cost to produce a prototype or even to and sort of proof-of-concept is prohibitive.

I guess my question is this; BASIC Stamp products seem very simple, cost effective and powerful for prototyping, doing the proof-of-concept and even building some single unit gadgets that can be actually useful. Does BASIC Stamp (and related products) provide and good starting place for product development? Can you take something you've built using BASIC Stamp software/hardware and directly convert it to and more "industry accepted" setup. For example. Let's say I build something that will change the world. I do it all using BASIC Stamp products. I decide that I'd like to market this idea and produce it. Will I need to completely re-engineer the entire thing in order to mass produce it?

Anyway, I'm still going to buy a bunch of BASIC Stamp stuff. You can get a lot more for your money this way. If anyone has any information on this please let me know.

Thanks,
Brian

T&E Engineer

I started a little over 2 years ago with Parallax products. I bought a BOE-BOT from Radio Shack and loved the Basic Stamp 2 portion more than the robotics. From here it was clear that the Basic Stamp 2 was for me as it was simple to use and learn as it has a BASIC like language (PBASIC). However, although it is simple to learn from, it was lacking interupt capability and speed. The cost for developing multiple projects with $50 - $80 Basic Stamp 2 versions·would be a factor too.

I decided to move up after a 6-9 months to their Professional Development Board (PDB) and start learning their SX chips (in particular the SX-28) - which is under $3 so for multiple projects it is very cost efficient. However you do need to have either a $30 Blitz key for programming the SX chip or a $50 SX-Key (built in debugger - highly recommended!). The Basic Stamp 2 is a higher individual cost but do not need programming keys like the Blitz or SX-Key. To me it made sense to go with the SX chips as a next step up. They are very similar to PIC chips if you have worked with them. The best thing is that they have a FREE Basic like language that evolves (SX/B) and updated from time to time. I am not an assembly language programmer (even though I did some in EE courses in college). The Basic Stamp 2 series can only be programmed in PBASIC but the SX chips can be programmed in either SX/B or SX assembler. This offers much more flexibility.

The SX/B language is a bit more complicated then PBASIC but most programs can be converted between them without too much effort. For new concepts and projects, I will usually write my programs in PBASIC for the Basic Stamp 2 series micro-controllers because it is EASIER to start with. Once I have it working on a BASIC Stamp 2 (BS2), then I will re-write it for SX/B - because it is much cheaper than the BS2.

SX/B offers much faster running programs (upto 50-75 MHz) - even though many programs run fine under 4 MHz. When I use LED matrix modules with the SX-28 or SX-48, I need to use an Interupt for the display updates that the BS2 doesn't have.

So to sum it up, it depends what your goal and needs are. Many applications can be easily developed and run great with a BS2 but if you need more speed and lower cost then you need to use an SX-28 or SX-48 with SX/B (or SX Assembler).

One thing that I love about this forum, is if you get stuck after reading the user guides and online help, you can always post your questions here at the Parallax Forums.

Now, if you need more advanced video·& audio capability and more memory, etc. then look into the Propeller chip. I played with it and it had some great capabilities but FOR ME I had difficulty learning SPIN and wasn't going to learn Assembler so I am sticking with the SX-28 / 48 and Basic Stamp 2's for the most part.

Good luck and post your questions. You will have lots of good support here!

Mike Green

Brian,
Parallax sells all the pieces for the Stamps separately including their pre-programmed interpreter chips and they have an appropriate pricing schedule based on volume ($5-$6 in 1000's lots for the interpreter chip). All of the pieces other than the interpreter chip can be bought elsewhere.

RDL2004

BS2 OEM

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- Rick