Hello Parallax Community,
The BASIC Stamp 2SX, 2p24/40, and 2PE modules have finally exceeded their announced End of Life (EOL) date and there are finally no more supplies of these parts, anywhere. Some Parallax customers have been asking us about alternatives within Parallax, as their company supplies of BASIC Stamp 2SX, 2p24/40, and 2PE modules have finally been exhausted.
We’d like to support moving you to the Propeller Multicore Microcontroller.
But first, a little more background around the EOL. The BASIC Stamp 2SX, 2p24/2p40 and 2PE modules used the Ubicom SX microcontroller, which was forced into obsolescence as a result of patent infringement lawsuits. I posted the SX’s EOL notice in 2009 and circulated it widely to our customers. The SX design was not owned by Parallax but we did everything we could to stretch the supply out for 15 years. Parallax even managed foundry production, packaging and in-house testing while Ubicom’s business pivoted to IoT. This was a significant effort for our company but it ensured our customers would have inventory for many years, so I feel we did the right thing for our customers.
[Note: The BASIC Stamp 1 and 2 modules are not affected by the EOL and will be in production for many years to come. The BS1 and BS2 use Microchip PIC chips to run their PBASIC language interpreter, and these chips are projected to be available for many years.]
Thank you –
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
My first suggestion is to use our Propeller modules, especially for lower-volume production where the BASIC Stamp SX modules were used. Customers may minimize their design efforts by using the surface-mount FLiP Multicore Module (Propeller 1) and the P2 Edge (Propeller 2). Both have power supplies built-into them and can drop into a socket on your printed circuit board. See the product pages for specifications on each of these modules.
In terms of long-term availability, the Propeller 1 and 2 microcontroller designs are fully owned by Parallax. The FLiP and P2 Edge modules are both manufactured in Rocklin, California. We control the supply chain and own the intellectual property — and that means they’ll be available for many years to come (like the BASIC Stamp 1 and 2, which have been in production for 30 years).
When designing a printed circuit board for higher volumes (100+) you could design the P1 or P2 microcontrollers into your design. We can provide design guidance, our PCB files, and Bill of Materials (BOMs) for any product we manufacture, open source. Specifications of the P1 and P2 are shown below. The price of the individual chips are $6 in quantity.
The BASIC Stamp was made famous due to the ease of it’s language, forum support (and YahooGroups, if you remember back that far) with examples published across the internet. For the Propeller 1 and 2, we have an online repository like GitHub (but a very lightweight, easy-to-use version) called the Object Repository (OBEX) and it’s accessible here https://obex.parallax.com A short video below shows some of the features of OBEX. You’ll see that we have library drivers for anything you want to do with a Propeller, and every function you used for the BASIC Stamp SX, plus features you never new existed (video, DAC/ADC) with eight cores running concurrently!
Learning Spin is easier for BASIC Stamp users with this particular library from Martin Hebel https://obex.parallax.com/obex/bs2-functions/ You’ll be programming the Propeller 1 in Spin, but the PBASIC commands are very familiar, and you could run them in eight concurrent processors for true parallel processing.
These PBASIC commands are supported in this Spin library:
COUNT, DEBUG, DEBUGIN, FREQOUT, PAUSE, PULSOUT, PULSIN, PWM, RCTIME, SEROUT, SERIN, SHIFTOUT, SHIFTIN, HIGH/LOW/IN, FREQOUT, and PWM. EEPROM, READ and WRITE were also recently added.
The PBASIC commands could provide some assistance with code translation, and would be a bridge to the Propeller 1’s capabilities in Spin, including video, display drivers, and sensors — allowing for expansion of the current application of the BASIC Stamp SX.
The easiest way to program the Propeller 1 Multicore Microcontroller is using our BlocklyProp Graphical Programming Language. This drag-and-drop programming environment was built on Google’s Blockly project. Parallax’s port of Blockly to our version (BlocklyProp) is the most advanced microcontroller version available, supporting multiple cores. There are limitations to using BlocklyProp, but it’s ability far exceeds the requirements of the BASIC Stamp SX while adding new features that run can run concurrently using the “New Processor” block.
Several successful applications and products have been built on BlocklyProp using the Propeller 1 Multicore Microcontroller in the FLiP Module format. Two examplkes:
I truly dislike being unable to talk to people directly when I have questions about products. Although I can read, sometimes it’s just faster to talk to those who have designed the products I’d like to use.
We offer this for the Propeller Multicore Microcontroller. You can speak directly with our design team, whenever you’d like. Just give me a ring (916) 625-3010 and I’ll arrange that for you, or send me an email to kgracey@parallax.com.
These are the other human support options we offer:
