Hello, Before a friend of mine passed away. I have known him since the late 90s. When I found out he passed away it was sad day for his family and myself as well. He as of 5 years ago was playing around with some Basic Stamp processors. and I found it would be cool If I can do something with them. He was going to make some temperature sensing with a 16x2 screen and a normal 10k thermistor. well Things happy and never finish his project. I throught it be cool to try to see If I can program it and give it to his son. Because I know his son would love it.
I know an normal arduino avr would do it but I thought it be cool make the basic stamp processor working with the screen and termistor temperature sensor.
My question would be is it possible to program as basic stamp processor using arduini IDE? I know it's not a offical arduino processor and arduino is all I know. Any help or pointing me in the right direction Would help me out big time.
Joseph
Edit: To be honest I don't know what processor it is until tomorrow. That is when they come in. I'm just trying to get a jump started to see where I need to start from.
Hey jremington, Thank you I will take a look at it. From what I heard and never known this but he paid over $15 thousand USD on screens, microprocessors, Thermistors, 9v battery holders and PCB to try to make a small business out of it. However he took that with him and really not sure what to do with all this. And This was over 10 + years ago he tried to take on this project.
The Basic Stamp (which is based on PIC processors, running a Basic interpreter) was pretty ingenious, and what got Parallax started. I had a couple of Stamps, in early 1990's.
But when I look at the website now, it is pretty clear that Parallax will be dropping the Stamp line in the near future. It is hard to find a "getting started" tutorial, so they are clearly not expecting to attract new customers.
You might consider making a donation to a nearby school.
Here is a link to the list of available commands. There are commands for handling LCDs, even I2C, but I don't see anything referring to analog inputs (I'm saying that because of the thermistor). See if it works for you.
I was thinking the same thing, And I will. But I thought it be nice, fun and a splitting headache to try to get one up and running. Maybe who knows. Again Thank you for the link, I'm looking at it and will report anything.
Good point, I don't either, and don't recall there being an analog input. However, it is possible to accurately determine a resistance (thermistor) value using a digital input/output and a capacitor of known value.
The process involves timing the charge/discharge cycle, from which you get the RC time constant. See the RCTIME command.
You need the Basic Stamp programming software, which was vaguely similar to the Arduino IDE, with a program editor and serial programmer. It ran on a PC (PCDOS or perhaps an early version of Windows, I don't remember), which may be hard to reconstruct these days.
In practice you write a PBASIC program, which is then compiled into tokens and sent to the Stamp over a serial line, where the tokens are stored in EEPROM. The Stamp blinks lights, reads a thermistor, etc. and can send data to an LCD or back to the PC using the DEBUG command.
I found this interesting web site, which explains how the BASIC tokens are stored in EEPROM. They did not waste a single bit of EEPROM storage! Decoding the BASIC Stamp
Edit: this was for the British knockoff called the PicAxe: As I recall, the original programming interface was a direct connection to a standard RS232 serial port, and could be a single 47K series resistor to protect the PIC input from overcurrent.
The Basic Stamp 1 used a PC parallel (printer) port connection, but you could buy an RS232 serial port adapter. The Basic Stamp 2 used an RS232 serial port connection, with a simple level shifting interface built in.
I dug through my junkbox and found the original Basic Stamp 1 (Rev D) and a Basic Stamp 2sx, which I never really used. About that time PIC programmers became cheap, with a decent (and free) assembler and editor IDE from Microchip, and I never looked back.
If they’re original BS2 modules, I think they used a PIC16C57 chip.
I probably have the original paper manual if you can’t find it.
As an interpreted BASIC, they’re relatively slow… I did a pretty complex project about 25 years ago, which worked fine, but I rewrote in PICC on an 16F84, and it was noticeably faster !
However, "Basic Stamps" are still available, still supported, and pretty easy to use. They were the go-to system for ease-of-use before Arduino came along.
