Parallax Propeller, why is it so overlooked?

12blocks is written by a guy here in Chch.

He's a guru for the Parallex stuff and the IDe will interface to a large number of different platforms (inc Arduino)

It's a drag and drop style but it does have the code albeit with unique names.

Why are you answering a 1yr old conversation???

I have read that 12Blocks can help programming this chip.  Have you try this IDE?  Does it really have a good compiler?

@DAB

Ya there is some neat things that can be done with it... I mean you have 16 counter that are independent hardware implementations, a 2MegaBaud UART and as I mentioned a scalable sigma delta ADC which is a speed vs resolution type of idea, this only requires careful layout and and passives. You can probably get a 20bit ADC with a dead bug layout if you dont want to design a mixed signal PCB for a manufacturing. I choose the propeller when I want pure determinism and speed, and do not mind laying out special peripheral chips as needed. Plop a cypress FX2 on the pcb and now you have 480Mbit USB, and a wiznet or ESP2886 and you have wifi. A few differential/instramention amps and bob is your uncle! Most of the time this works well because Im not going to wack a 24 bit dac on an atmega328. If determinism isnt very important and I can get buy with lack luster peripherals I will go with the AVR every time. I dont need a low noise hi res dac to display a battery voltage on a 16x2 lcd this is where AVR works great and it will drive a few relays to switch battery pack banks in and out with general purpose power to  spare!

My personal system is for my robot has a few SRAM and i2C EEPROMs on board along with a propeller chip and an atmega 328 (acually two one 328 runs that battery system, 16 2400ah NiMH split into eight cells and eight 8 cells. One 8 cell set runs motors the other 8 cell set runs everything else, the idea was to get the motor transients isolated all the way back to one single ground point between systems, directly on the battery pack.) The idea of the 328 connected to the propeller chip has an a 4 line bus between the the two chips, with jumpers on each connection (this supports i2c,spi, or 4 bit parallel com bus). This is so I can use the 328 as a pin extender its function is to read all the sensors buffer the data in to its sram and then the propeller poles the AVRs stored values. The propeller is reading the quad encoders and running motor control chips. Then the rest of its cogs are there to do make calculations on the data and move the robot in the appropriate way. This bot will eventually have 2 custom made laser scanners (using wii mote cameras) and an SBC with a CAM running openCV. The SBC will crunch all the measurement data from the lasers and openCV then send that off to the propeller who will think about the right move to make combining the SBC data along with the 328's sonar and bump sensor data. Eventually SLAM will come to play, and maybe Parallela! But this is a clear case for the propeller. For those of you who haven't seen what it can do I figured Id post some unique things, that I dont think other micros can do very easily

http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/105674/hook-an-antenna-to-your-propeller-and-listen-to-the-radio-new-shortwave-pro…

http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/129652/the-lassiter-inexpensive-lidar-distance-detection-ranging-propeller-wiimote

http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/131954/my-attempt-at-23k256-sram-drivers-includes-8-bit-version

Triage Training System | learn.parallax.com

There is all kinds of stuff 6502, 780 emulators that are deterministic, projects running CP/M on the prop etc... these links kind of show the diversity, there are alot of industerial control and RF projects out there too

I took a look at the chip when it came out, but I was just not ready to move into a new computer system.

I always thought it had a lot of promise, but I did not have the time to look into how easily the eight processors could be exploited.

DAB

Yep, that's what I meant when I said earlier that the XMOS has "special support logic" - it (and some other processors) are much better at bit banging than your normal micro.

Unfortunately the price that is paid for that (in the widest sense) has (so far) kept such processors out of the mainstream.

There's been a thread on E14 recently talking about the Snickerdoodle (I wish they had thought of  a less silly name) which is an even cheaper way of getting a Zynq (but no array processor).

MK

For my work stuff I use mainly ARM based micros with FPGAs for the hardware gymnastics (when required).

I rather like the idea of all the esoteric chips but they've never looked convincing enough to actually use (Propellor, Parelella, XMOS, GreenArrays GA144 etc)

re. Joey's comment on I2C - I do often bit bang I2C on micros because I've had so much trouble with the built in stuff in the past. But it does mean that the micro is busy all the time it's I2C-ing.

MK

No problem with fan boys 

I decided to go mainsteam (ARM) instead of niche (Xmos) despite I like the solutions in the niche products. PSoC and Xmos are very intresting (have dev boards lying aroud but no time to give them a closer look)

In the past I had an Inmos Transputer board which got me into programming but turned out to be not relevant on the market. Same with parallel programming, tile based rendering and many other technologies I had great hopes for. For hobby it is ok to look besides the mainstream, but if you have to make your living it's hard.

The propeller can bitbang spi @ 10mhz+ and the Uart is 2Mbaud... It doesn't have USB and a lot of other cool peripherals but theHALre coming in the prop 2. I personally think using a dedicated chip works just as well. I think ARM has taken off, it has the Arduino IDE on some chips and EMBed.. I think it would be more popular if the chips were easier across to port HAL layers across vendors and cortex 0/1/2/3/4 architectures. I have plenty of ARM boards which wont run Embed.

I guess I think of the propeller as having 8 little arduinos in one chip with internal lines to talk to each other. There is no need for interupts on the propeller architecture, but if you must have them they have been implemented in software. The propeller also has 16 hardware based counters which are fairly useful, Ive been reading a piece of software that uses 3 counters to receive RF and mix the IQ signals and output audio. This is all done with just an inductor antenna and a few other passives to make the props sigma delta A to D work. Which btw is very scale able up to 16 bits (most likely higher if proper care is taken during layout), its a resolution vs speed trade off.

The chip is very capable It is niche but it's niche works very well for hobby robotics and automation. Its also much easier to program without interrupts the deterministic nature is great... you can count on things getting done in a certain amount of time without interrupts disturbing them. Im not trying to sound like a fan boy, I guess the real reason I wonder why the arduino took off over the propeller is because Parallax already had the hobby market with the basic stamp, so why did hobbyist pick a 16mhz single core mcu over an 80mhz 8 core mcu? I personally think the PSOC chips are great and wish they actually had the arduino market they are easy to use and the digital fabric allows you to get your feet wet with an HDL when your ready, on top of being an ARM core.

Don't forget if it is implemented in software, it can conflict with resources since it will usually use one or more of the built in timers, ISRs etc..