This September, Parallax has been in business for 35 years. As part of our celebration, we asked our customers to tell us your Parallax story. This is one we received from our community which will be shared throughout the month.
Well, believe it or not, my first potential encounter with Parallax was adversarial. Back in 1992, a friend of mine and I drove the full length of the Baja peninsula for a month of bicycling, windsurfing, hiking, etc. We were both enamored with the Microchip PIC controllers, and Parallax was selling a device for programming them. What they didn’t have was a built-in UV eraser, and we thought we could do better by building a unit that provided one: press a button, erase, program, done! Thus began Bueno Systems: Basically Unemployable Engineers Newly Organized.
Returning to Port Townsend, it occurred to me that there was more low-hanging fruit to harvest. Prior to 1992, I was designing and building linescan cameras for sizing produce. My go-to sensor was the TSL201, a 64-pixel unit made by Texas Instruments — later to become the TSL401 (128 pixels) and, finally, the TSL1401. I thought that it would be relatively simple to build a smart, self-contained linescan camera based on this chip to be used for industrial inspection purposes. Of course, it was driven by a PIC chip, and we made and sold many of these cameras to industrial customers.
My technical contact at TI was Jack Berlien, and we had many discussions by phone regarding this chip. Ultimately, TI spun off their optoelectronic division to a group of employees under the name TAOS (Texas Advanced Optoelectronic Solutions) — which was ultimately bought up by AMS (Austria Micro Systems). Jack was still my go-to guy at TAOS, and he had been talking to Ken Gracey at Parallax about a strategic technical affiliation. Jack approached me about designing a color sensor board that would interface TAOS’s TCS230 color chip with Parallax’s BS2. Great project! When do we get started? And that was my first official introduction to Ken and Parallax.
The rest is history. I’ve been not only a designer for several Parallax products (ColorPAL, SoundPAL, TSL1401-DB, TCS3200-DB, Propeller Backpack, BS2pe Motherboard, MSort (M&M sorter), etc.) but an enthusiastic customer of their products, especially the P1 Propeller chip, more especially as manifest in the FLiP module — IMO the finest product Parallax has ever made!
-Phil Pilgrim (phipi)
