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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 Even though its ancient and outdated.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.

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