Parallax Propeller 1 P8X32A Released as Open Source Design | Hacker News Reader

Parallax Propeller 1 P8X32A Released as Open Source Design

parallax.com

61 pointsmmastrac7 comments

I have loved working with this chip because the paralelism is so simple. Each processor works at a consistent speed no matter what. In low level robotics, timings is crucial. You can have one core positioning a bunch of servos, another core sampling ultrasound, another doing serial connections etc. For a cheap, simple chip it worked very well for a lot of robots I have built. I have used an Ardiuno Mega on a robot and while Arduinos have a lot going for them, it is difficult to control many things at the same time.

The problrm is that this chip hasn't really improved in seven years. Now the alternative is things like a Raspberry PI or other boards with cheap ARM processors which are much more powerful. A Prop is still great for I/O.

Agreed. Parallax simply left it in suspended animation. Its a nice chip that would have had a bigger impact had they put the same effort into it as they put into the Basic Stamp. You can still use a Basic Stamp and do lots of fun stuff. Even though its ancient and outdated. But the learning materials and amount of knowledge shared by parallax and others is huge. Had they supported the properller in the same way I think that they could have Arduino'd (sorry for this) it. Creating a community of fans around such a great platform would have made robotics much more fun.

I once used the Basic Stamp in a product prototype - a fairly sophisticated piece of instrumentation. I initially chose the Basic Stamp (iirc it had a Ubicom chip) for its totally rock solid RS-232. Eventually I realized that the Basic Stamp was enabling me to write firmware for a reasonably complex "real time" control system. Over thousands of cycles of tests on a limited production run I never had a single glitch or problem with the firmware.

The Basic Stamp is still a rock solid platform. I know of places using it in production systems without any issues. The problem is how its been replaced in the mind of the hobbyist (at least the younger ones). Before the arduino, you basically went with a PIC16F84 or a Basic Stamp. The Atmels were available, but IMO, they weren't as popular.

Plus BASIC feels "old" these days. People get introduced to programming trough the web (which uses C-style syntax languages like Javascript), scripting with Pyton/Ruby, or mobile development which follows the same pattern. Even though BASIC is a fine language (it was my first) people can't relate to it anymore.

I wonder if this means Propeller 2 is about to drop. Seems like it's on schedule for what they said back in February: http://www.parallax.com/news/2014-02-24/propeller-2-schedule...), but they've slipped several times on their schedule from Prop2 in the past.

Anyway, the Propeller is a really cool chip. For the same price as an Arduino you get an 8-core, 32-bit, 80Mhz per-core processor and programmer board. Now, you often have to waste one of them for "process" scheduling (which you write yourself) and one for IO mapping (which you also write yourself), but it's really fun if you're more into programming than the average bear.

It supports mouse and keyboard from the start and it has an add on to very easily setup RCA video and audio to a TV. I've even seen speech synthesis done on it. There is a lot of really good code available for basically putting together a really simple, almost Atari VCS-like computer, except capable of doing rudimentary 3D graphics.

And the Propeller 2 is going to be 10 times faster. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm freaking excited.

Some other interesting, related news to this:

http://hackaday.com/2014/10/30/improving-the-parallax-propel...

Nice move by the Parallax folks. I expect this will actually get a lot more participation with it. One of the challenges that Parallax has had in the past is that nobody sees them as a 'chip' company so they never get any respect when you suggest designing in their CPU design.

That said, it is a wonderfully quirky design. With its multiple execution units and odd syntax. I built a Lissajous generator out of one and it was quite fun. Highly recommend it to anyone interested in CPU architectures.

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