I didn’t know the propeller was still for sale. I remember learning spin years ago to play with one of the older propeller chips. This is a good surprise and seems like a fun project to do. For some reason I keep wanting to go into retro computing but never seem to have the time …
Parallax will continue to offer both the original Propeller and the second generation chip, known as P2 or Propeller 2 basically as long as they remain in business.
The idea was to offer more capabilities to existing Propeller users as much as it was attracting new users for whom the first chipboard not make sense.
The newer design being named a "2" can be confusing!
They are similar, yet very different devices.
This project uses the original, which in my opinion, was the perfect choice.
The Propeller is a good bridge into retro in my view.
The device offers great retro level video just about any way you want it, except digital. VGA, NTSC, PAL, s-video, others... You can drive TTL displays, such as a CGA, EGA, Monochrome. And on composite, you can crank horizontal resolution way up to do, 80bcolumn plus text.
People have made various Basic dialects, there is a quite capable Forth, and of course SPIN is fun and easy. Feels retro to me.
One has to go looking, but there are a lot of games too.
I would actually go so far as to say the Propeller is a good bridge into general electronics, certainly anything digital. It comes up in the context of video generation, but it can do so much more than that because of the multicore design; instead of built-in peripherals you can use a core to implement more or less what you need, certainly within an educational context where you're not as focused on peak throughput for an SPI device or something.
The problem is that the Propeller community ended up being a lot smaller than, say, the Arduino community, so learning materials aren't nearly as available outside of Parallax's publications or the forums. That said, I think that if you took a group of kids and gave them Propellers compared to a similar group with Arduinos, the Propeller group would understand a lot more about why things work the way they do.
Isn't Propeller bit problematic from educational point of view because it's design is so unique that knowledge from it is not so readily transferrable to mainstream hardware?
I learned a ton on it and would not say that is true.
And the P2 chip can put all that to bed due to it literally supporting almost every computing model and can even do multiple language programs that run all at the same time!
I have written programs that are SPIN, C, assembly and BASIC. Compile, run, and there it is! All running together, concurrently.
One can write parallel algorithms, concurrent ones, or just do sequential compute too.
Yes, the design is unique, but what one learns can be applied broadly.
One does wish more would work as easily and be performant, but that is a minor league problem.
My ability to use just about anything else is now very significantly improved.
Yeah, I would easily call the P2 chip the Amiga of Microcontrollers.
The thing is a playground, but also at the same time more effective than one might expect at first glance.
Video options are improved too. There is a color engine capable of mapping colors into color spaces. Say you want green and yellow and you want to display those on the following video signals:
Ntsc, Pal, VGA, Component Video (YCbCr), HDMI, Composite, S-video
The thing can do that, even outputting them all at the same time!
640x480 on the HDMI without tricks and refresh rate games. (24p)
Full HDTV and above on the analog component and VGA, and the usual interlaced or non for Composite. 240i 480p.
Has a CORDIC math engine able to crank out trig, powers, roots, shared among all cores. Drop arguments, pick up some 50 ish cycles later. Amazingly, it is pipelined such that all cores can do that non stop and it all gets done.
Interrupts have been changed into events, with a time being one event, pin state changes, all sorts of fun things. Three level deep priority system too.
Let see, what else...
Oh, hardware locks for managing concurrent or parallel access to common memory.
Oh, this is big:
Every pin has a "smart pin" state machine that can do stuff like trigger an interrupt when a given state criteria is met.
Each PIN can be an ADC or DAC, and the input precision is up to 12 bits with builtin filtering, or you can get the raw stream to do better of you want to.
Outputs are high quality too.
Want an on board 20Mhz scope coupled with 100Mhz complex signal generator?
