[Coco] re:Radio Shack STAMP Developer's Kit

[Tony C]

Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:59:44 EST
From: <KnudsenMJ at aol.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] re:Radio Shack STAMP Developer's Kit
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Message-ID: <250.8bf9d2c.31576bb0 at aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

>>Another posting mentioned a few sources.  But I wonder if the  convenience
of
>>just paying cash and taking it home from Rat Shack is worth the  $90
price?
>>Learn the tricks from that kit, then decide on buying other  stuff?
Probably worh the price to get your feet wet.

>>Well, I'm no beginner, but would probably need some help from the manuals
>>getting the PC stuff to talk right.  Probably the hardest part is
 remembering
>>what nice features of Coco BASIC you can't use in the STAMP  dialect!

This is the least of your worries. Back when I boight my first stamp, which
was over 8 years ago, te basic cammand set is
very small, approx 1/10th of the coco.

Now many newer and (much faster) stamps have emerged since then, an probably
have more full-featured command sets.
I'm sure you can find the details on Parallax's website (www.parallax.com,
as Neil Morrison had indicated.
The crystal on the stamps I've seen were well into the MHZ range (back when
I first got involved), so I'm sure the instrucion cycles are fast enoguh to
easily handle and midi project.

At one point I thought about making a midi bus analyzer, (somehwat) similar
to the SCSI analyzers I was using at my work.

>>Yeah, N and V is a good mag, but I don't see it very often.
I think the online articles are available. Check out their stamp article
collection for ideas.

  >>question is whether they tie up CPU cycles in bit-banging  serial I/O,
>>or have UART sections that do it "for free", like an RS232 Pak on a  Coco.
>>And how many such UARTs running at 32 KB could a PIC attend  to?
You could always do it in assembly, and skip the basic interpreter.
There are even C compilers for the pics, but they aren't cheap.
Parallax has a pretty good IDE for doing the assembly stuff.

The Stamp editor now has a much more powerfull debug capability than
previously. You can actually step through the code now,as opposed to just
running it live.
Atmel also came out with there version of a PIC, which was lightning fast
too.

You really should look for pic forums,mailining lists,  or newsgroups to
talk to the experts.
At one point Parallax had several mailing lists links on their website.

Also check out Dontronics http://www.dontronics.com/index.html
I bought a pic simulator from them once, which is really helpfull to watch
the registers change after easy instruction.