Early propeller pioneers

BradC · 2009-03-10 15:14

So I've been trolling back through the early propeller threads looking for little diamonds in the piles of dirt (and there are quite a few).. and I notice that a significant number of early players have been MIA for months to years.. Do serious propeller swingers (as opposed to those speculating and spinning) suffer from long-term burnout and just fade away as the wash subsides?

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Cardinal Fang! Fetch the comfy chair.

Timothy D. Swieter · 2009-03-10 16:18

Hmmm - good question. Some stay for the long run, some come and go as you have seen. For some it may be a fad, for others it is a passion and yet others it may be a work or project related and then they are on to the next task. I imagine some users get burned out or distracted by life.

Anyone remember Desilva? What is he up to now?

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

Philldapill · 2009-03-10 16:29

Timothy, DeSilva was the person I was thinking of in particular. He was a HUGE help on so many issues, but I don't think he thought we appreciated him. I certainly did, along with many others.

heater · 2009-03-10 16:34

Desilva was the first name that came to my mind. Leon has gone a bit quite since he discovered XMOS.

I seem to have been here for ever, working on the same project !

There's a lot more I'd like to do with the Prop though so I think I'll be around for a while yet.

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For me, the past is not over yet.

Philldapill · 2009-03-10 16:38

Hey, where's Hippy? I haven't seem him much, either.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2009-03-10 16:42

It's good to see a CORE group who have hung on in the three years I've been here.

The Propeller forums have become very "social" in the last couple years.

The upside is that people have become friends and enjoy working Propeller projects with
others who they have gotten to know electronically. [noparse][[/noparse]Quick expo plug: come to UPENE & UPEW
and meet these guys in the real! It's scary cool. [noparse]:)[/noparse]]

The downside is that it may have frightened off a few really brainy EE's (I hope I'm wrong!)
who have seen the Propeller open to the "unwashed masses" (Yes, I count myself here.)

There will always be a little turnover for the reasons that Tim mentioned, others (like myself)
have become addicts and while there is more to learn, I'm not going anywhere.

OBC

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New to the Propeller?

Check out: Protoboard Introduction , Propeller Cookbook 1.4 & Software Index
Updates to the Cookbook are now posted to: Propeller.warrantyvoid.us
Got an SD card connected? - PropDOS

Cluso99 · 2009-03-10 16:47

I owe a lot of thanks to a number of people, and in particular Hippy. He's busy with a new job, but he's around occaisonally.

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Links to other interesting threads:

· Home of the MultiBladeProps: TriBladeProp, SixBladeProp, website (Multiple propeller pcbs)
· Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
· Emulators (Micros eg Altair, and Terminals eg VT100) - index
· Search the Propeller forums (via Google)

My cruising website is: ·www.bluemagic.biz·· MultiBladeProp is: www.bluemagic.biz/cluso.htm

Ale · 2009-03-10 17:37

Nobody mentioned Mike Green yet. He also used to hang here quite a bit. As of lately I haven't seen him that much.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2009-03-10 17:44

Hopefully there have been enough of us here in the Propeller forum to start taking some
of the Q&A load off Mike. [noparse]:)[/noparse] Looks like he's been hanging out with the BASIC STAMP guys lately.

I can't say enough good about Mike. I'm not sure which he has more of, patience of knowledge. [noparse]:)[/noparse]

OBC

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New to the Propeller?

Check out: Protoboard Introduction , Propeller Cookbook 1.4 & Software Index
Updates to the Cookbook are now posted to: Propeller.warrantyvoid.us
Got an SD card connected? - PropDOS

Gadgetman · 2009-03-10 18:00

Ale said...
Nobody mentioned Mike Green yet. He also used to hang here quite a bit. As of lately I haven't seen him that much.

Well, he's still here.
In fact he just posted in the Sandbox...

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=790885

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Don't visit my new website...

Mike Green · 2009-03-10 19:06

Hi! I bought an eZ80F91A (a Z80 based board) some time ago that I've mounted to a Protoboard to use with OBC's VT100 emulator. I couldn't get his XModem downloader to work reliably with my kludged Z80 XModem routine, so I redid it all using the Kermit protocol and just got it working a day or so ago. Now I have to get the #$^% 1MB flash memory to work as a rewritable mostly-read-only disk drive for storing programs. I already have the SRAM working as a disk drive, but it gets erased on a reset.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2009-03-10 19:13

Ah ah,

more knowledge than patience.. [noparse]:)[/noparse] (Just kidding Mike)

This explains where Mike has been. [noparse]:)[/noparse] @Mike: You should start a thread and detail this project!

OBC

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New to the Propeller?

Check out: Protoboard Introduction , Propeller Cookbook 1.4 & Software Index
Updates to the Cookbook are now posted to: Propeller.warrantyvoid.us
Got an SD card connected? - PropDOS

Chris Savage · 2009-03-10 19:18

There was another gentleman from the Sacramento Robotics Group who was writing a lot of early tutorials...I can't remember his name now that his sticky thread is gone.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering

Ale · 2009-03-10 20:08

Mike if you have some code to share... I have my eZ80 board just here... and some propeller boards too. The prop really makes a powerful yet inexpensive terminal.

Mike Green · 2009-03-10 20:44

Attached are zip files for 1) the eZ80 CP/M, BIOS, Kermit server, and a utility to copy the A drive (SRAM) to the B or C drive (flash) and 2) OBC's VT100 emulator modified to include a Kermit command that works with the Kermit server. I haven't tested this in detail, but they seem to work. I can start Turbo Pascal, but it hangs on exit. I can start SBasic, but I haven't actually tried to compile anything yet. It seems to hang on exit too. Hmmm.

Feel free to experiment. These are "works in progress", certainly buggy, but maybe you can glean something useful from them.

Mike

Mike Green · 2009-03-10 20:47

The connections from the eZ80 to the Protoboard are all made using I/O pins 0-7. The only ones actually used at present are pins 0, 1, 6, and 7 as described in the comments at the beginning of propCOMMkermit.spin. You don't have to connect pins 6 (enable write to flash boot block) or 7 (reset eZ80 from Prop keyboard).

Chris Savage · 2009-03-10 20:49

It was Dave Scanlan...whatever happened to Dave? He was posting all those Beginner tutorials and then he vanished. Last Seen : Saturday, June 16, 2007

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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering

StefanL38 · 2009-03-10 23:28

Hello,

I joined the propellergroup maybe 1,5 years ago.

I'm still looking into the forum almost every day.

But to be honest: the questions are much less interesting to me than in earlier times

Some of them are very special
Some others have a lot of code to look through

This is why my posting rate went down

best regards

Stefan

Ale · 2009-03-11 18:30

Mkie: I' have a look at them and report back, great stuff!

Thanks!

Paul Baker · 2009-03-11 20:32

I asked Chip about Dave a while ago, and he said he's too busy to really be a presence.

Some newbies got upset about deSilva's sometimes brusque manner of dealing with them, I tried to gently broach the subject with him and he chose to leave rather than soften his approach, I tried my best to get him to stay but was unsuccessful.

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Paul Baker

mpark · 2009-03-11 21:43

He could dish it out but he couldn't take it [noparse]:)[/noparse]

Dr_Acula · 2009-03-12 00:02

@Mike Green, not wanting to change this thread, your project looks really interesting. Maybe a new thread?

both sbasic and pascal not going back to CP/M is pretty fundamental - possibly more an issue with cp/m rather than those two programs.

I'm doing a lot of work in sbasic. It is this arcane ancient language, found on a CD (the Walnut Creek archive) that is hard to get and which was written for the kaypro and never really got widely used. It has this really cool feature that you can write both procedures and functions, and then use those procedures and functions with the same syntax as existing inbuilt procedures and functions. So you can add 'modern' instructions borrowed from vb.net and c.net and java. Examples would be ucase() and openfile(). The ability to shell programs and chain programs is really handy too. I guess there are things I think are pretty fundamental to any language - ability to add more functions, file access, string manipulation, easy use of arrays, shell and chain, ability to mix and match machine code and higher level code in the same program, and a fast compiler. And it helps to be able to swap between vb.net and sbasic without making syntax errors along the way. I see a recent post on C objects for the prop - I wonder if the same thing could be done in Basic? (The BS2 library is rather spartan). sbasic could well be running complex programs too via heater's prop simulation - it did "Hello World" last night to my great astonishment.

Anyway, back to the original thread of the lost pioneers. I think I might be one of the great unwashed that OBC mentioned *grin*.

Rayman · 2009-03-12 15:57

I think there's a German Propeller related forum that DeSilva still posts on...

Whit · 2009-03-12 20:33

There is always the ultimate Propeller Pioneer and that is Chip Gracey, who still posts on a regular basis (when they don't have him locked up in the evil lab).

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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

Chris Savage · 2009-03-12 20:35

Paul Baker said...
I asked Chip about Dave a while ago, and he said he's too busy to really be a presence.
Some newbies got upset about deSilva's sometimes brusque manner of dealing with them, I tried to gently broach the subject with him and he chose to leave rather than soften his approach, I tried my best to get him to stay but was unsuccessful.

Well that is most unfortunate.· Even Parallax Tech Support was inspired by Dave Scanlan's series and they often referred (and still do) callers asking certain questions to his thread.· Well, hopefully someday he will come back and rejoin us.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering

Philldapill · 2009-03-12 20:47

Whit, that evil lab is called the Chip Cage, from what I hear. LOL

CannibalRobotics · 2009-03-12 22:01

I think attendance and attention is project driven. I joined as a Stamp guy probably 8 years ago and hung out there frequently but as I needed faster processors pre-propellor I migrated over to Atmel land. Since then I formed a new company and came back under cannibalrobotics. This was when the Prop popped out as the perfect solution for my rovers. I still kind of come and go depending on the phase of the project be it software, electronics, mechanical or testing. Right now I'm still buried in getting the Linx 433-LT radios to perform to spec.
Jim-

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When your problem seems insurmountable, read the forum for a while.
Solve someone else's problems and yours won't seem so bad.

rjo_ · 2009-03-12 22:34

Both Martin Hebel and Dave Scanlan are serious dudes.

They co-authored a paper, which found it's way to the ACM Portal... about the Prop... in 2007, which can be found here:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1289314

When Parallax is looking to nurture the academic community... I'm sure they remember Martin and Dave[noparse]:)[/noparse]

And I'm sure that even if they don't actively participate in the forum, they do send their students here. Which is another reason to treat new arrivals like they are
related to royalty[noparse]:)[/noparse]

Rich

Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL) · 2009-03-13 00:50

Raymond said...
I think there's a German Propeller related forum that DeSilva still posts on...

German Prop Forum(Translated to English via Google)

translate.google.ca/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.propellerforum.de.vu&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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Aka: CosmicBob

hippy · 2009-03-13 01:07

I'm still around as Cluso99 notes, but it's that age old problem - plenty of time to play and no money, or plenty of work and no time to play :-(

Fred Hawkins · 2009-03-13 21:31

YES!

More recent footprints of one elusive deSilva: long winded link so click on deSilva, looks like this: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.cczwei-forum.de/cc2/thread.php%3Fpostid%3D3663&ei=a8-6SZLvH8-jtgeQ0sXEDQ&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=7&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%252B%2522de%2Bsilva%2522%2B%252Bpropeller%2Bmicrocontroller%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us%26num%3D30

Don't ask me how come its so long. I just point and shoot.

Maybe one of our German readers can find some internet traces of his workshops.

Post Edited (Fred Hawkins) : 3/13/2009 10:14:46 PM GMT

Early propeller pioneers

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