I have always wanted to play with the BASIC Stamp electronics kit, and Fry’s had the Parallax Discovery Kit #27807 on sale for $20 off, so I bought that plus a GPS module #28146 and an ultrasonic sensor module #28015. This kit is part of their Educational product line for schools. Radio Shack also resells their kits.
I’ve done some small circuit designs for people involved in audio applications, but I prefer a kit like this over a bunch of loose parts, since I’m not really a hardware guy.
Parallax invented the BASIC Stamp product line, which is a programmable microcontroller with flash memory on a board that runs a BASIC virtual machine (slowly). A nice Windows editing program is provided for editing and downloading code to the microcontroller. It makes prototyping moderately complicated designs almost trivial.
The $150 Discovery USB Kit includes a PCB with rev 2 microcontroller, small breadboard area (2 sq. inches), and power conditioning circuitry, a bag of discrete parts including LEDs, switches, servo, AD5220 pot and a 7-segment display, a USB cable, 2 manuals and a software CD. An AC adapter is not included, but you can either use a 9-volt battery or buy an optional adapter.
It’s a little over-priced. Basically you’re getting $20 in parts, a USB cable and 2 books. But it is a nice package, and I suppose I’m subsidizing a company that contributes to the educational market. For those on a budget, you can either buy a minimal kit and download the manuals in digital form, or buy a clone kit.
They should pre-insert the PIC IC (or use a ZIF socket) and bolt on the battery terminals. I had to use a lot of force to get proper insertion – almost enough to damage the PCB. I felt lucky when the IDE identified my board as still working.
If you download the latest IDE, make sure you get a file that is at least 6 MB to ensure you also get the online help files. The help is well-done – I’ve never seen circuit diagrams in a Windows help file before.
Parallax software is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Mac and Linux.
They also sell Javelin Stamp products, which run Java.
Parallax also has some robotics kits for building a single robot, a robot plotter, or 2 dueling robots.
The instruction set is fairly Open Source at this point, since it’s simple and people have “disassembled” it.
Parallax PBASIC Tokenizer Library
The Basic Stamp – an Overview and Instruction Set
Very cool.
See wikipedia for more information, including links to clone vendors who offer more features or speed, or the “C Stamp.”