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.
Hiya, Ken,
I have three Parallax stories:
During the early stages of COVID, you had a sale on early P2 prototypes, and I grabbed one and made a distance detector out of it, with red, yellow, and green LEDs to indicate dangerous or safe distances. I actually wrote an article for it in Servo magazine: 2020 Issue-2, page 54.
https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/build-a-social-distance-detector-monitor-using-the-propeller-2
When my son graduated from wrestling in high school tournaments to providing lights and sound for them, he wanted a better lighting controller for finals matches, something capable of flashing spotlights in different patterns to add a little more pizzazz to the spectacle of the finals. The DMX controllers he reviewed could not meet the demanding requirements he had, so he asked me to develop something from scratch. I used the Propeller QuickStart, with its 8 buttons, as the controller, where each button controlled a different spotlight lighting pattern using voltage-controlled relays. It worked so well and he liked it so much, he wanted to keep it – I don’t like parting with my Propellers – and we nearly had a wrestle off to decide who got to keep the QuickStart unit. He paid me for it, instead, and I bought a replacement.
For Christmas, 2021, our family decided to exercise our creativity and have a “makers only” secret Santa exchange: all gifts were made by hand. I struggled to come up with a captivating gift for my twelve-year-old granddaughter, and decided on a poster-sized snowflake made of 9 RGB LED strips, the colors of which were individually addressable so each segment could display different colors for a psychedelic experience. Plus, with the help of her dad, she could learn a little programming to customize the snowflake color patterns. For this project, I used a Propeller FLiP, with its breadboard-friendly profile, which greatly aided in the wiring. Because the chip didn’t have the capacity to run 27 individual PWMs (9 segments by 3 colors), I wrote my own PWM code, executed in three separate cogs, giving a seamless lighting experience.
Congratulations on 35 years! Here’s hoping for many more – and an extra hope for that 16 core P3 in the not too distant future. You can’t have too many cores! 😀
Aaron Minner
