Waiting on a couple zener diodes before I can build my Xbox EEPROM reader; that'll have to be on Monday. For today, I pulled the BASIC Stamp microcontroller board out of the Space Agency prototype thing I found and got it going.
First I soldered a USB cable onto the +5V/Ground leads for power... not the most elegant solution in the world, but it'll do for now. Plus, I can just plug it into one of the spare ports on the PC I'm using to program it and avoid the need for an extra PSU:
Said PC is my CLI ST5500 thin client running Win2K Server, for no real reason other than it's on my desk & has a serial port. Plus, with the board plugged straight in like this, it makes for a pretty tidy dev setup. The last version of the IDE from Parallax says it requires XP or later, but seems to run fine on 2000. (There's a newer, multi-platform version of the software but it's a "Chrome browser application" so nope. I'll stick with a good old standalone desktop app, even if it's old & I have to run it from Windows.)
Up and running! It recognised my board straight away & I was able to write a quick ancient-meme-tastic version of 'hello world.' This is a pretty slick little dev setup; I like how it has everything in one place.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to retrieve the previous program OFF the board, although it wouldn't have done me much good anyway. The IDE compiles the program before sending it over, so the EEPROM only stores machine code, for hopefully obvious reasons.
Stamp BASIC isn't really a typical BASIC; it shares some syntax but is fairly low-level. Something like a hybrid between BASIC & assembly. The available commands are a bit limited and it lacks some functions you'd expect. That said, this thing has a 50MHz CPU, 32 bytes of general-purpose RAM (for variables, etc.), 64 bytes of scratchpad RAM, 16 I/O pins, and 16kB of EEPROM space for storing programs, so I should be able to make it do something cool (hmm, there's a game jam coming up...) I've actually never messed around with a microcontroller like this before, so it'll be a fun learning experience.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!