Parallax Propellor Quickstart Board

When I was at the Parallax Robotics Expo back in April, I picked up a P8X32A Quickstart Board. I've had my eye on the Propeller chip for a long time, I first heard of it before release. But to date, time spent on other things kept me from getting started with it.

The P8X32A Quickstart Board, in the obligatory Altoids tin for scale.

At the robotics expo Parallax was cutting some great deals on their products, however. And I figured that if I had something on hand it might make it a bit easier to take a first look at the Propeller. With the discounts they were giving at the show, I seriously considered the Propeller Starter Kit, which includes the Propeller Demo Board. But, since I had no idea how long it would be before I actually got a chance to use it, I decided that a smaller investment would be wiser. So I got a Quickstart board.

The Time Window Opens

Finally, last Friday afternoon, I had a chunk of time open up as a result of being too ill to make a prior commitment. (I can't help but think of how many important things in my life have happened because of time made available through being too sick to do what I was supposed to do, or because I was stranded somewhere without transportation.) The tiny box for the Quickstart board had been living next to one of my computer keyboards for over a month, so I didn't even have to go looking for it. There was a USB cable of the correct type sitting in the drawer next to me. So I started in.

To keep it simple I decided to start out with the Parallax programming environment, Propeller Tool on my Windows 7 machine. I expect to try out Brad's Spin Tool, the other major development tool for Propeller, on my Mac and Linux machines a bit later.

I was pleased to see that it installed everything, the driver for the USB interface chip on the Quickstart board, the IDE, and the serial terminal tool for the Propellor. It says it does that before you download and install, but I was a bit unsure of whether the Terminal program would actually be in there before I actually installed the program.

Once the software was installed, I started it up then plugged in the Quickstart board. I got a ding-dong from Windows telling me it saw the hardware. I was able to find a menu item to report what chip version the software saw, and it saw my chip. I didn't get the message I expected from the documentation at first, a dialog pop-up. That appeared later, the first time I tried to send a program to the board.

About that...

Parallax has a tutorial that runs you through the initial steps of programming the Quickstart board. Aside from the fact that to get to each of the several pages you follow a link from the product page (the pages aren't linked together--that is, when you get to the bottom of one page there's no link to the next one) there's another oversight on these pages as well.

The page gives a short, simple program, describes what it does, then goes on to a slightly more sophisticated program. It tells you about how the editor behaves. But it doesn't tell you how to actually get the code on the chip.

Now, I'm not exactly a first timer here. I looked at the menu and saw "Run" at the top of the screen. But when I chose that I got a list of items, none of which were clearly "compile and run". So I started selecting things at random. I also didn't know whether to expect a simulation environment to start, or how to select between a simulator and the real hardware. I scanned the tutorial web page up to the third program in it, and found no specific instructions.

This is one of those things of which Sherlock Holmes remarked, "the answer is perfectly obvious, once you know it." There is no simulation environment in the free tool, that costs extra (I wish Parallax could follow Atmel's example in providing it with the free tool, the first job I applied an AVR to happened because I was able to use the simulation tool to verify the software timings I needed). And the Run=>Compile Current=>Load EEPROM or Run=>Compile Current=>Load RAM would either have done enough to let me get what I wanted--the sample code running on the target hardware.

But that wasn't clear. I was doing a quick try it and see, so I hadn't spent time with the chip's datasheet yet to learn about how it loads and runs software, what facilities it has for storage, what the implications are of loading EEPROM vs. loading RAM (I didn't even know if they were both program storage, for all I knew one was program storage and the other was for loading an initial state for testing.)

So I was a bit stymied until I just decided to try things at random and see what happened.

At the bottom of the tutorial page is a short table describing the shortcut keys and what they do. Below the actual step-by-step examples that omit instructions for how to compile and run the code. There they describe F10 and F11, for example, and the implications of each choice (RAM or EEPROM).

I managed to get the short initial program (which lights an LED) loaded and running. The LED lit up. There was much rejoicing.

Demo, Demo, Who's Got the Demo?

The next thing I started to wonder about was the demo that showed off the touchpads by lighting up the LEDs when the pads are touched. This hadn't appeared to be pre-loaded like demos often are on other processors. Nor did there appear to be anything obvious among the Propeller code that came with the IDE (another thing I fouond by spelunking, rather than as a result of documentation.) There were no projects with names like "Quickstart Board Demo" or "Touchpad Demo" or whatever. Nearly all the demos appeared to be for hardware I didn't have.

At first I went back to the Quickstart tutorials on the web. I did searches for the demo on the Parallax website and through Google, but the closest I came up with was modified versions of the demo listed in a forum thread. I did find the demo later, but it was only by going back and looking for it time after time that I finally located it today, my fourth day trying, here, on the Parallax Semiconductor Quickstart product page, not on the Propeller downloads page or the Parallax store product page, where there are lots of other downloads but not this one. The location is so subtle, that even after I found it earlier today it just took me five minutes of backtracking to find the right page over again. It's on the linked page, at the end of the list of downloads at the bottom. Direct Link to P8X32A Quickstart LED-Touchpad Demo Software Download

Well, back to last Friday. The demo was interesting to me, but while I was looking for it I came across information about the video capabilities of the Propeller. Frankly, while I'd heard the Propeller did video I just figured it was something along the lines of bit-bashed video like what I've done with several other microcontrollers. I've even generated video from a little Atmel AVR ATTiny12 with nothing more than a software loop and a resistor divider-no fancy shift registers or anything.

Needless to say, it was pretty simple video. No colorburst, no color. But it got some data out of the chip on a two-pin interface nicely (three levels are needed for even black and white video to get the sync signals for timing in addition to the black and white pixel data.)

The Propeller goes way, way beyond this. It's got both NTSC and VGA signal generation hardware on board. And it's not just single bit video, either. It can generate full color at a number of resolutions. This I had to try. But my little Quickstart board doesn't have a video output on it. I looked at the Propeller Demo Board and saw that it had a video interface. It was just a 3-resistor DAC and an RCA jack, so I decided to make one.

It doesn't get much quicker and dirtier. It took longer to pull the parts than to assemble.

Five minutes later, I had my own video interface. (Note: the accepted way to do this if you're not buying your Quickstart board at a Parallax event is to go to Gadget Gangster and buy your Quickstart board with a free QuickProto board, which includes the video interface along with lots of other cool bits that make the Quickstart board so much more ready-to-go.)

At first, the video was pretty wonky. Then I realized I had the resistor that's supposed to go to P13 going to P15. Once I fixed that, it was better, but still not good. The graphics demo ran OK, but one of the text demos wouldn't even sync properly, the other had poor contrast. The thought crossed my mind that either the timing in the Propeller wasn't much better than my old Atari Pong or that the provided 5MHz crystal meant that the timing wasn't right on. But I've learned the hard way, time and time again, to suspect user error first.

I took another look at my too-quick and too-dirty video interface and found that the resistors that were supposed to go between P12 and P13 were swapped. A moment later I had pulled the pins from the plastic IDC header and moved them to the correct positions. This is why doing electronics when you're under the weather is not always a good idea. Fortunately this wasn't a mistake that'd let the smoke out.

Once that was done, the video looked great on all the demos. I then had to make a batter adapter so that I could try it out on the big screen TV in my living room. A quad-AA battery pack came to hand quickly enough, one of the ones with the 9V snap connector on the end. Then I soldered a 9V snap connector pigtail to another IDC header and spliced in an IDC socket pigtail. That way I'd still have a place to put my ground pin from the Q&D video interface without soldering it to the battery connector. As a final refinement, I put a slider switch in line on the positive battery wire to act as a power switch.

Once that and the video adapter were plugged into the Quickstart board, I took it out to the living room and hooked up to a free composite video input. It looked great.

I spent the rest of my time mucking around with the code of the various NTSC video demos. Spin is a really easy language to learn, if you've got any programming experience it'll come easily. It's even simple enough I could easily see teaching it as a first language to new programmers (with a Propellor board on hand, of course, to get the full hardware + software experience!)

Cleaning Up Shop
As mentioned, I have now been playing with my new board for four days. In spite of a couple of minor snags (figuring out what to choose to compile and run my programs, finding the demo for the Quickstart board itself) it's been a very rewarding use of my time. I can see now why people who've been raving about this controller for five or six years are excited about it.

After my first night playing with the board, I learned while reading the Parallax forums that the Propeller could also do RF-modulated video. That's what I spent mid-day Saturday playing with. I put rabbit ears on my big screen (talk about incongruity!) and a pair of jumpers on the RCA jack and managed to receive video from the Propeller from about 25 feet away. What worked even better was an LCD handheld television left over from the analog TV transmission days. I was able to get as far as 10 feet from my back door, a total distance of about 50 feet, and still get good reception. I don't think it's making it as far as the neighbor's house, though (fortunately.)

Yesterday I buckled down to some more structured learning of the Spin language, reading the Propeller Manual and Datasheet, and so on. Today I'm continuing that, working my way through tutorials and such. I also took a look in the goodie bag I filled at the Free tables at the Robotics Expo--there are a couple of Propeller boards in there that I can't wait to find a use for now.