[chbot] Anyone playing with the Parallax Propeller 2 ?

[ceo at andygardner.com]

 From a post on an HP/Agilent groups.io list...

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I imagine that pretty much all legacy HP displays can be emulated using a single chip and a few screenfulls of code, outputting straight to VGA or HDMI :) Parallax Propeller 2 is the magic sauce that makes it possible. It’s quite an amazing design, done in the open (yeah, open source silicon with full commercial backing) and it’s actually fun to program it. It was meant to “mess with” - it’s not like the usual ARM chips with a boatload of erratas and data sheets thousand pages long. You can do very meaningful things without leaving assembler, if you like that sort of a thing. Want to sample XY signals at 100Ms/s? You can. On each pair of I/O pins. Simultaneously :)

They are currently offering 2nd silicon revision engineering samples, and you can actually talk to the designer of the chip on the forums. Those samples work very well, and the “errata” fits in a paragraph last I checked. I imagine that the production silicon won’t have an errata. There’s a whole bunch of people that used that design before it was available in silicon, so lots of kinks got straightened out long ago.

Also, it comes with a FORTH interpreter in ROM, with runtime library that actually supports the peripherals. What’s not to love :)

Cheers, Kuba Ober


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