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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 int
by bliti 12y ago
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 Even though its ancient and outdated.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.
- quarterwave 12y agoI 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.
- bliti 12y agoThe 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.