Stamp or PIC?

[FotoPlasma]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

actually a Basic Stamp board contains a PIC chip - I dont know if you can reprogram them to run assembly or C.

The BasicStamp1 and the BS2 both ran off of PICs, but everything after that used Scenix microcontrollers. The Scenix chips can be, themselves, programmed in ASM or C, but the BasicStamps can't.

If you google for something like "pic programmer", you'll come up with a good amount of results. The NOPPP (NO Parts PIC Programmer) was interesting, but there're many other possibilities for DIY programmers, as has been said.

[Kevin Watson]

These look pretty cool.

-Kevin

[Venkatesh]

I feel vaguely lonely in my partiality to Stamps. =)

I like the Basic Stamp rev.D (especially secondhand, as it is cheap). The BS1 can do pretty impressive things, even though it has only 8 I/O pins. And even though it is slow, it is quite usable. I have heard complaints from people about its lack of a watchdog timer, but there are ways to guard against crashes/code lockups/infinite loops. I spent quite some time last year trying to create a system to use interrupts with the Basic Stamp 2p, and I created a workable system. I'll dig out the schematics sometime soon.

My main problem with the Basic Stamp is its lack of a timer. For all the circuits I have used the Stamp rev.D in, I have had to use an external one. Other than that, the Stamp is quite powerful and can do more than you can think. Just try and get them secondhand, as they are more expensive than PICs, if bought directly from Parallax.

Btw, I have read somewhere that "anything the Stamp can do, the PIC can do better." The only exception I have been able to come up with concerns the DTMF instructions, but very few people use them anyway.

[velocipenguin]

Originally Posted by Venkatesh

The only exception I have been able to come up with concerns the DTMF instructions, but very few people use them anyway.

I suspect that some of the nicer PICs with built-in PWM generation hardware, when coupled with a bit of external filtering circuitry, could do an equally respectable job.