On Thu, 19 Apr 2018 13:16:31 GMT, Jan Panteltje declaimed the following:
As I recall, a lower cost competitor to the Parallax BASIC Stamp... A PIC with a byte-code interpreter for a specialized BASIC burned into it, with an IDE that compiles said BASIC and downloads it to the chip.
-- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
Thanks for that. What you say is almost the reverse of what I read into the Amazon blurbs for the two books. However, the buyer reviews were pretty much identical except that a few didn't like the layout and diagram positioning in S&M.
I'm fairly certain that the old Lancaster books will see me through the projects I currently have in mind but I've got H&H bookmarked in case I need it later.
Fortunately for me, the electronics on these projects is little more than interfacing an RPi to a PICAXE or to non-digital stuff, with the more interesting/challenging bits being implemented in C or PICAXE 'Basic'.
Oh well: back to the presets up/downloader for my KRT2 airband transceiver...
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Time does strange things to memory... I worked at a company that had a pair of 1905's in 1983. One just ran in batch mode and the other was used interactively during the day. There were plenty of the funny orange cased ICL VDUs about the place. The 1905's sat in the air-conditioned room along with an LSI 11/23+. I was writing stuff for assorted Apricot PCs and the LSI 11 and got to the room regularly to load 9trk tapes etc. I remember them being in quite dark grey cabinets unlike the orange on the VDUs and the creamy-beige of the LSI 11.
I can remember being there when one of the 1905's was being rebooted and watching the questions being answered on an ASR33 console to boot the OS (GEORGE III?). The machine would partially start then crash and they were on the 4th or 5th attempt. I can clearly remember one of the 1905's had 256k of memory (can't recall if it was core) and whilst the bootup guys were working, there was a panel open and there was a wall of lights (incandescent bulbs). There were few lit whilst the questions were answered and then after return was hit, the room lit as the lights came on. Some flashing and it all went dark. Lather, rinse, repeat a few more times till it stayed up and the jobs were re-queued.
Having read the comments, I'm wondering what I was looking at? If it wasn't the CPU cab for the 1905 because there were almost no lights, what was it? Definitely part of the boot process because once the machine was up, the lights did a proper movie depiction of a computer. I really don't think it was 2900 series because the owners were constantly grubbing about for peripherals and parts as by 1983, the machines were well obsolete. Again I remember there was joy and rejoicing when a number of 60 and 200MB disk pack drives were found somewhere in Ireland and someone was sent off to hire a big van to go and get them.
Answers on the back of an unused punch card.
PICAXE is a family of chips with from 8 to 40 pins. All contain a PIC MPU, EEPROM for firmware, user program and constants and a small amount of RAM. Two pins are reserved for a 4800 baud serial port, used primarily to load programs into it but can also be used for serila comms by the user program. The firmware lets you use the remaining pins (apart from power and ground, for digital I/O, ADC or DAC or to drive servos. The latter is a lot easier that it was on the old Parallax STAMPS, which required your program to loop while flipping the pin up and down. The PICAXE is a lot easier: once enabled to servo pulse train starts and you only need to write to the port if you want to move the servo.
PICAXE are also very cheap: the 14M02 I'll use can meet my requirement of driving two servos plus the ESC (so effectively three servos) while monitoring three input switches. These cost GBP 2.25 each (less if bought in quantity) and PICAXE also sell a rather nice and reasonably priced download cable with a USB serial adapter at one end and a 3.5mm stereo jack at the other. The jack is nice because small/light 3.5mm sockets are easy to find and install.
The worst you can say about the PICAXE is that is that its designed to be programmed in a fairly primitive integer BASIC which is meant to be cross- compiled on an Intel box and then loaded into the PICAXE over the serial cable for execution. The compiler is available for Linux version and Windows. The Linux version can also be run on an RPi under a modified version of qemu and this works pretty well.
Same here, generally, but for the model timer I'll use a custom PCB because the result will be smaller and lighter (0.8mm epoxyboard) because both size and weight are important.
Unfortunately the PICAXE only accepts downloads through a 4800N1 serial connection.
*ESCAPE*.../ESCAPE/...ESCAPE....Escape...escape..... .-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
I've never seen a 1905, the biggest 1900 I ever saw or got my hands on was a 1904S at British Steel's Battersea labs. I was sysadmin on that for a bit under a year in 1977.
Almost certainly George 3, a surprisingly good and advanced OS for its age (it was a late 60s design that I used/maintained from about 1971 to
1978. It was one of the first OSes to have a hierarchic filing system.
Probably ferrite core. That would be 256Kwords - 1900s all had 24bit word addressing and, for character strings packed four 6-bit ISO characters into each word.
As I said, I never used a 1905 - it was just a 1904 with a hardware floating point processor, and was dropped after the 1905E - only the later S and T series machines had semiconductor memory.
Almost certainly and engineering panel and possibly specific to the
1905/6 models since those were the only models to have hardware FP (and the 1906 has hardware registers too: everything else used the first few words of each program as its registers.
They were all burnt orange, even the 2903, a desk-sized box that ran on an office environment. It was actually a 2900DFC (Disk File Controller) running firmware that emulated a 1900 and ran bog standard 1900 software under George 1S (a modified version of the single-streaming George 1 OS. George 1 had nothing at all in common with George 3.
:-)
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Stamp... A
They are very similar in concept. Its a long time since I've looked at a STAMP, but IIRC the main differences are that:
- the STAMPs are bigger and a lot more expensive than PICAXES
- STAMP has a much better ability to name RAM variables and a generally nicer integer BASIC than the PICAXE
- STAMP has a much better debugger than PICAXE on Linux
- PICAXE has nicer RC servo support and adds ADC/DAC analogue support
- I don't think the STAMP compiler/debugger can be run on Linux or an RPi.
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Now you said S and T series and 1905_S* has jumped out of assorted neuron triggers. It could well have been semiconductor memory because another guy there said something along the lines of "each cab contains
256k x 6bits of memory".But oh, 35years does things to your memory. I never really paid much attention, it was an awful place to work but I needed the cash and did have my own LSI 11 to play with!
think C and assembler is also an option
Very low cost and handy chip.
-- Any fool can believe in principles - and most of them do!
On a sunny day (Thu, 19 Apr 2018 15:44:29 +0000 (UTC)) it happened Martin Gregorie wrote in :
Ha, BASIC lives!
The only BASIC computah I still have, at least last time I looked it was still working, is that 8052AH BASIC thing,
Wiring is not as bad as my graphics card was..
But these days I just program the PICs in ASM, use gputils (has gpasm in it) in Linux in a terminal. More close to the hardware. Sometimes I write the code in C on the computah first to test, and then translate it to PIC asm by hand. My PIC programmer hangs from a par port I/O card on the PC and sits in front of the PC. All PIC projects have a 4 pole header for programming. Sometimes I just test in the programmer:
Panteltje (c) sc3_pic-0.1 Commands AnnnENTER set proportional band, default 10 V BnnnnnnENTER set battery cutoff voltage in mV, default 3000 mV CnnnENTER set OLED contrast, range 0-255, default 0 D use comparator 2 - pin 14 for HV feedback, default off d use analog input AN4 pin 16 for HV FEEDBACK, default GnnnnENTER set loop gain attenuation, 0 or 1, default 0 h help (this) I integral on, default off i integral off, default OnnnnnnENTER battery cutoff level in mV, default 3200 mV PnnnENTER set maximum PWM pulse width, in percent, default 50% SnnnnnnENTER set clock speed calibration, range 0-65535, default 3035 TnnnENTER set auto shutdown time in minutes, range 0-255, 0 = no auto shutdown default UnnnENTER set PMT voltage, range 0-2048 v print status WnnnnnnENTER battery low warning level in mV, default 3200 mV Z9874ENTER enter test mode z disable test mode, default
battery voltage 1.592 V battery low warning voltage 3.200 V battery cutoff voltage .1 V ADC steps 403 PMT voltage setpoint 816 V PMT voltage 806 V pwm 43 max pwm 150 loop gain 13 integral mode 1 test mode n OLED contrast 0 US 1 DS 1 proportional_band 10 comparator HV sense 0 clock calibration 3035 auto shutdown minutes 0
That is how I develop... sometimes ;-) Takes a few seconds to create the binary from asm: panteltje12: ~/compile/pantel/sc3_pic # make gpasm --force-list -w 1 sc3.asm panteltje12: ~/compile/pantel/sc3_pic
Takes a bit longer to prog it into the PIC: panteltje12: ~/compile/pantel/sc3_pic # jppp18 -i sc3.hex -e -p -Y -s 20 parport_data=0x378 Loading hex file: Program 9362 bytes at address 0x000000 ID 0 bytes at address 0x200000 Config 14 bytes at address 0x300000 EEPROM 0 bytes at address 0xf00000 Erasing chip. Writing program space. Writing config space. Verifying program space. Verifying config space. Ready. jppp18 -i sc3.hex -e -p - Y -s 20 6.08s user 2.11s system 8% cpu 1:39.94 total
Yes I wrote jppp18 programmer too.. in C.
'Nuf tronix for now...
BASIC?? who needs BASIC??
Forgot the link..
On Thu, 19 Apr 2018 16:16:24 +0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie declaimed the following:
Unbelievably "more expensive" when a BS2p run $80, in a world where even an expensive Arduino is about half of that (and a TIVA C board is a quarter). {I'm not pricing RPi or BeagleBone as the latter are full application/OS boards vs no-OS embedded systems).
The Parallax provided one, no... But there is
-- Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/
^^^^^^^^^ That is one of the scariest typos I've ever seen.
-- /~\ snipped-for-privacy@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs) \ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. / \ Fight low-contrast text in web pages!
Wow. How long until we get up to infrared? Let's see, about
1000 nm at 300 MHz/meter... 300 THz?
...0x1B...^[...
Oh, wait...
^C...
OK, to hell with it...
kill -9...
NO CARRIER
-- /~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs) \ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. / \ Fight low-contrast text in web pages! http://contrastrebellion.com
On a sunny day (19 Apr 2018 23:48:51 GMT) it happened Charlie Gibbs wrote in :
Try rm -rf /*
We are alreay in IR:
On a sunny day (19 Apr 2018 23:48:51 GMT) it happened Charlie Gibbs wrote in :
It was a joke referring to that mistake HE (trump) made in one of his tweets, From:
Indeed 'Precedent' is a sign on the wall.... Biggest weapon salesman in the world needs a market: war, WW3 to be precise. 'Nuf politics here, I am following up on alt.politics.trump.
It couldn't have been an S series box because the only models released were the 1905 and the 1905E: I've checked two different sources and both agree in this point. The S and T series machines were the only ones that didn't use ferrite core memory.
Both the original 1900 range and the E series used ferrite core memory and it would have been 24 bits wide because that was a common feature of the 1900 series: A program compiled on any 1900 would run on any other
1900 thanks to their 'extracodes' An extracode looked like any other assembler instruction but was either executed by code in Executive, the lowest level OS in a 1900, more or less equivalent to a PC's BIOS, or by hardware if that was fitted.The PERI instruction, that handled i/o, was always handled by Executive, which contained the low-level code needed to drive tapes, disks, printers etc so is best thought of as a service call.
All 1900s could do floating point calculation, but in some machines (1905, 1906) the FP instructions were executed by hardware while in the rest they were passed to Executive's software FP module.
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Yes, I remember seeing references to that but never used it because I still had a Windows PC at the time.
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Stamp... A
Must be 3rd party - neither are available from the PICAXE shop.
-- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Hello Jan,
Have you ever seen this: RONJA (=Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access)
It gives you an IR wireless link to another friend nearby at 10 MBit FD EtherNet. I love this 100 % selfmade connections. There are full descriptions of how to build and test this. Especially the option to keep de glasses free of condensation for instance. For resistors in a rectangle setting for heating the glasses from inside. But this RONJA is not suitable on inland ships (my other hobby), because of all the movements ships always have ;-(. Think about up/down, turn left/right, rolling, stamping, gearing etc.
I also have seen discs in a dome that move in the oposit direction the ship moves, to get a constant good link to the satelite they follow. That is possible both for tv wathing as an internet link via satelites. But they ask such high prices for such equipment and contributions ;-(. I think the new DigiTenne DVB-T2 is a more cheaper solution. In Germany there is already DVB-T2 for television, but in the Netherlands they still only use DVB-T1. And only NPO1, NPO2, NPO3 and one local tv-transmission are Free to Air.
I have two information packets avaialble for hobbyists in Dutch. One is a selfbuild AIS+ECDIS for inland ships with a Raspberry Pi 2B/3B+. And the other are 123 schematics for on board ships electricity. Here are the links: Good luck with it. You know, a Raspberry Pi fits on almost every boat ;-).
Nautical Greetings from Henri at the river Rhine in Arnhem.
I don?t know what aperture the IR link requires, but I?d look at a voicecoil-actuated mirror for beam stabilization. These are widely used in drone camera mounts, for example.
And the use of IR-based ?Ethernet? is actually not new. Hewlett-Packard Laboratory had such a system running in a large building in 1982. It was considered for a product, but never made it out of the lab (there were some ?gotchas?, like security).
-- -michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://michaeljmahon.com
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