On April 15, 16 and 17, Parallax attended the 2008 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Ca.
Parallax had a team of 8 employees on hand at ESC to help answer questions, demonstrate some of our new products and just spend time talking to our customers about the new Propeller Chip.
Parallax was also joined in our booth by a couple of our valued customers who are using the Propeller Chip in their own products.
Hanno Sander was on hand to demo his Viewport/Dancebot. Hanno Sander has invented a two-wheeled dancing robot. One that can waltz, tango and disco.
For more info and to see the Dancebot in action see: http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4429872a24096.html
About Hanno:
Hanno Sander received his degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1995. During his studies he managed student projects including a hybrid car, a micro-satellite and a rabies vaccination project in Brazil. In 1995 he founded Daptyx to develop customized information services. The first product was an adaptive newspaper which monitored a reader's click-stream and used genetic programming to tune a model to predict future behavior. After selling Daptyx to Oracle in 1997, Hanno transitioned to product marketing/management at Oracle. His first project was the File System feature now part of the Oracle database. Hanno continued his career at Verity and Yahoo, continuously delivering massively scalable consumer and enterprise software products, directing market strategies, people and organizational excellence, defining and translating company strategies into innovative technology products in diverse markets. Since 2005 he's developed sophisticated yet affordable robots from Christchurch, New Zealand.
Also in attendence was Eric Moyer of Open Stomp. Eric displayed and provided demonstrations of the new Coyote 1 Digital Effects Pedal. What is the Coyote 1 you ask?
The OpenStompTM Coyote-1 is an open source audio effects processor built for guitar players. With the Coyote-1 users can develop custom audio effects in software (like distortion, echo, chorus etc.), mix multiple effects to build "patches", and exchange those effects and patches with the OpenStompTM community.
A companion Windows application (OpenStompTM Workbench) allows Users to combine effects into patches graphically, and to move patches and effects between the Coyote-1 device and their PC's disk.
The Coyote-1 O/S is open source so users can tweak it to behave any way they like, and the hardware is fully documented so that developers can take control of the whole pedal, dedicating all available system resources toward the implementation of unique custom solutions.
At the heart of the Coyote-1 is one the coolest, most innovative, and just plain knock-your-socks-off fun microprocessors to come along in a decade; the Propeller from Parallax. The Propeller contains 8 independent processor cores running simultaneously at 80MHz with a unique architecture supporting a high-level byte coded language called "Spin", and a low-level assembly language with an amazingly versatile instruction set.
The Propeller development tools are all free, and the Propeller architecture allows users to develop firmware with nothing more than a simple USB cable.
Its revolutionary architecture allows the Propeller to generate video in software by adding just three external resistors, so the Coyote-1 includes a video out port which can be used by developers for debugging or adapted to implement things like graphical tuners, spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, or light shows.
For more info on the Coyote 1 and Open Stomp go to: www.openstomp.com
If you where unable to make the show and need more information or literature about anything that was on display at Embedded Systems Conference please contact us at parallaxian@parallax.com