Quote:
Originally Posted by yash101
Yes. However, Parallax is still a small company and there are many product manufacturers who use their products.
If demand increases and the supply remains constant, there is a shortage and the price goes up.
If the demand decreases and the supply remains constant, there is an abundance and the price goes down
If the demand remains unchanged and the supply increases, the price goes down. Ceteris Paribus.
 Some economics review for me. I think it is the supply-demand curve which would give us the price after heavy load. Also, after the kickoff, many teams won't need another for a while, creating an abundance and reducing the price.
We could expect to pay $11 per chip instead of 12!

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Parallax has ample production to handle this load.
The cost of the Propeller is so low compared to 8 PICs or 8 AVR plus the support circuitry I wouldn't worry about it.
The key trade off with the first generation Propeller is the lack of peripherals.
It is also in some ways a positive.
You don't get stuck with whatever the chip designer may have goofed.
However you don't get the benefit of cheap integrated peripherals when you buy the MCU.
In reality Parallax has been able to support putting production volume in Radio Shack, schools, some business ventures to the point of product starting to hit surplus stores and they have past experience with FIRST in the sense that the control system circa 1997 and 1998 was essentially 2 Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 on the robot side. One BASIC Stamp 2 was tasked with the field radio tasks and the other was open to the students to do as they pleased.
In effect a single Parallax Propeller in an FRC style control system is 4 times the power and because of the way the I/O round robins it is vastly more flexible (at the small price of some enforced timing requirements that are...for this application...quite workable).
The answer to the FRC control system bid U.S. Cybernetical made would have allowed a cooperative system of one or more Parallax Propellers onto the robot. Literally to the point that you ran out of electricity. It would have been possible to literally assign cores (cogs) to functions even almost whole Propellers. Plus you could have used the Propellers on the driver's station.
When last I worked on this I had the ability to issue orders to whole subsystems in near plain English. Literally telling a prototype to: move left wheel forward at 20 RPM. Of course that was one concept.
I also have a graphical language I started creating to open source (effectively an alternative to LabView) that targets the FRC style system I laid out. However given the lack of interest from FIRST I am withholding that software until I feel it is in my interest to release it (my work, my choice).
In any event the big downsides from the Propeller are:
Lack of floating point math (has to be transparently emulated or done in a co-processor...both of which I did)
Lack of a hardware multiply (no longer an issue in the second generation Propeller)
Lack of hardware interrupts (depends on how deadset you are on hardware interrupts as they have upsides and downsides)
Lack of on-board integrated peripherals (they do have lookups for trig functions, PLL, etc)
Lack of a defacto real time operating system (in reality real time OS are often misunderstood and overhyped)
Lack of hardware drivers for say cameras (this is not as big a deal as it seems)
None of these would have prevented creating near supercomputing performance control system on an FRC robot.
The cameras could have integrated ARM processors, use a laptop, or stream to the driver's station.
One concern FIRST stated was that they felt it was too complicated for the students to understand.
Well...in truth...I find that doubtful considering the rules for FRC are pretty darn vast and complicated.
Oh and the control system with the radio was around the $300 mark when I last looked with a single Parallax Propeller at the stated retail price currently and a Turtle low frequency radio for the field communications sporting an additional Atmel AVR or Microchip PIC (locked out for FIRST's control). From there the additional ready to assemble Parallax Propeller modules were much less than $75. So really for the cost of the original cRIO you could have dozens of Parallax Propeller on a single robot. With multiple or single sidecars (the I/O to the side cards was flexible so you could redirect sidecar peripherals to one or several Parallax Propeller like a baseband network).
I didn't leave ARM out either. I made a camera module with an ARM CPU. However my design choice was that if real time OS was your ultimate demand put a laptop on the robot and plug the Parallax Propellers into that laptop. Use the highly cost effective laptop as your slave peripheral like people do now with things like the Beagleboard. The interrupt driven nature of the laptop on the robot could be easily over come into the real time domain using the Parallax Propeller to enforce timed operations where the laptop would otherwise have issues (such as monitoring an A/D converter, reading encoders...etc).