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SX sounds great, can I .... — Parallax Forums

SX sounds great, can I ....

TaipanTaipan Posts: 16
edited 2007-10-25 21:18 in General Discussion
Hi,

Many years ago I had a Basic Stamp which I had a lot of success with. However, for the last year or so I have been playing with AVR's and with a lot of help from many people have made some great projects. My current project is a Head Tracker for VR and I have 3 accelerometers, 3 gyros and 2 magnetometers with an 8 channel 16 bit ADC and an Atmega16. I am also using an HD44780 compatible LCD to aid the development. I am only just now integrating the data from all the devices and I have a lot of numbers to crunch. I am thinking that the AVR will not be fast enough for what I want, hence my search for a faster chip.

I have spent the last few hours reading about the SX and they sound great, but I am wondering how simple it will be for me to move to the SX chip. What I need is serial communications @115200bps using a Max232, SPI interface to the ADS8344 16bit ADC, an EEPROM to store calibration data and the LCD for use during development. Would this be a big task to set up? Any thoughts, advice or recommendations will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

  • Guenther DaubachGuenther Daubach Posts: 1,321
    edited 2007-10-25 09:12
    Switching from the AVR's to the SXes will definitely put you in a learning situation, as there are some remarkable differences in the design philosopy of both chip families. As you may have noticed, the SX is an 8 bit device, and other than the AVRs, it does not come with a selection of "built-in" hardware peripherals, like UART, SPI interface, etc. Instead, all such peripherals can be realized on the SXes in software - the so-called "virtual peripherals". You can find many samples for such peripherals, like UARTs, and SPI interfaces in the download section of the Parallax site, and in the available literature (including my book). Due to its high speed (typical 50 MIPs), the SX allows to design such peripherals in software. The big advantage is that you can "tailor" the peripherals exactly to your needs, and there is no need to go through the messy process of configuring hardware peripherals. This caused me headaches when I had to do some projects with AVRs.

    Maybe, the "trickiest" part you will have to master is the banked structure of the RAM memory, and the paged structure of the program (EEPROM) memory. Not understanding these concepts can cause you a lot of trouble when your projects grow, and you need to make use of more memory.

    As you had mentioned - you were successful with the AVRs due to a lot of help from many people. When you look at the SX section of this forum, you will recognize that there are many helping hands around, and that questions always find answers here.

    Now it's up to you to decide whether you take the red pill, or... smile.gif

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    G
  • BeanBean Posts: 8,129
    edited 2007-10-25 11:07
    I think it is probably do-able with the SX, but I would look at the Propeller chip too. It has 8 parallel processors (32 bit processors no less) and ALOT more RAM.

    http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/prod/prop/PropellerDSv0.3.pdf

    Bean

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  • TaipanTaipan Posts: 16
    edited 2007-10-25 21:18
    Thanks G
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