Posted by Joe Johnson.
Engineer on team #47, Chief Delphi, from Pontiac Central High School and Delphi Automotive Systems.
Posted on 5/24/99 7:39 PM MST
In Reply to: Re: Possible Configuration to keep things cheap posted by Rick Berube on 5/23/99 8:20 PM MST:
Went to the BasicX.com site.
WOW!
It is not everything, but it is a lot.
Faster, Multitasking, Floating Point Math, other goodies. One particularly good thing would be the internal networking support. If nothing else, FIRST could slap two of these on one board (like they do for the STAMP2's now) and have the entire MASTER/SLAVE communications be transparent to us on the SLAVE side -- no more wasting valuable loop time waiting for serial data to arrive from the MASTER CPU
I have not downloaded the complete documentation (yet :-), but it seems to be a real step in the right direction.
I wonder if BasicX would get on board as far as allowing FIRST to distribute the development software?
There is a long way to go before picking this particular chip.
One thing I would still like is to have the entire controller available for sale. If FIRST were to use this chip, how would they manage to make it do everything we what but still be available for sale.
Does anyone know of a board that uses this CPU? Can it be adapted for our uses?
I could definitely get behind something based on this chip. It definitely address the code development concern.
Joe J.
P.S. If FIRST wanted to get more power still, they could allow us to have a Robot Area Network of as many of these babies as we could want. We could effectively get N times the CPU power by having N CPU's onboard all communicating via the onboard RS-485 support. Could be pretty great.