Have a question about the Basic Stamp Chip Boards

[wes16zeus]

As you all know, I am an animator and not that good of a programmer but I'm working on it around the clock. I went to Parallax's Web Site and bought an experiment board for myself to have at home. Do you who know what your doing mechanical and programming wise think that this was a good purchase for myself or did I waste money?
There is a picture attached also of everything it has. Appreciate your replies.

came with:

StampWorks Manual by Nuts and Volts “Stamp Applications“ columnist Jon Williams (this includes the BASIC Stamp 2 manual);
NX-1000 BASIC Stamp Experiment Board;
BASIC Stamp II module (BS2-IC);
2 row x 16 character Hitachi-compatible parallel LCD with custom manufactured cable;
Digital multimeter with two probes;
Wire cutter / wire stripper / pliers;
Three 100’ rolls of 22 AWG wire (red, white, & black);
Screwdriver kit (two standard and two phillips);
Photoresistor;
‘555 timer;
8-bit serial to parallel and 8-bit parallel chips;
Dallas Semiconductor 1620 Digital Thermometer and 1302 Real Time Clock with 32.768 kHz crystal;
National Semiconductor ADC0831 8-bit A/D converter;
Maxim 7219 8-digit LED display driver;
National Semiconductor LM358 op-amp;
12 volt unipolar stepper motor;
Parallax standard servo;
12 VDC / 1 Amp wall-pack power supply;
Resistor pack assortment (220s, 1K, 10K, 100K);
Capacitors (0.1 uF, 3300 uF);
Serial cable;
Parallax CD-ROM;
Tidy plastic box to hold all of the parts; and
Technical support by phone and e-mail.

[Dan 550]

I think that the StampWorks set is a decent investment. You have it forever, it's yours, and you don't have to worry about taking it to and from the robot facility.

[Joe Johnson]

I think that the experiment boards that Parallax puts out are pretty worthwhile.

They have a lot of very good demos and examples that let you sort of get the Zen of Pbasic programming.

One thing to be careful about is that the vast majority of Pbasic instructions are of no use at all to you when it comes to FIRST.

The Innovation First hardware does not give you direct access to the input or output pins (with the exception of a few LEDs on the RC that you can flash directly if you want). All the other ins and outs go through the Master CPU. Further, the Master CPU works as a watchdog timer. If your Pbasic loop takes too long (basically you have 150 msec max), the Master CPU will assume you are hopely lost and will shut off your outputs. This is not a particular nice thing to have happen during a match, so I don't recommend it.

This system architecture makes most of the Pbasic functions useless (e.g. Pulsein, PWMout, Count, Tone, etc.).

I hope this helps.

Joe J.

[wes16zeus]

Thanks for giving your inputs in and next time i do something like this then i will post a thread to see if i should get it or not. Thanks guys!