PARALLAX DOCUMENTATION

PARALLAX FORUMS

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This is launch control: T-10 minutes and counting! All chat participans are "GO!" for chat with Chip Gracey! :)))

Carol Lynn Hazlett Am I here yet?

Lutetium welcome @Carol Lynn Hazlett !

Arsenijs Hi!

Hi @Jordan Bunker !

Joshua Reisenauer Hi.

Jordan Bunker Howdy @Sophi Kravitz!

Jon Thomasson hi to all the propeller head

Anyone with questions or something they want to discuss can use this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sNe1sCibQJp4Ad609V-trtYD6eaN3VVPV4V4hnFsGc0/edit#gid=0

Chip Gracey I'm ready.Antti Lukats, hello.

Carol Lynn Hazlett Hi Ken!

Ken Gracey Wow, lots of familiar faces here.

hey @Ken Gracey

Seairth Jacob @Ken Gracey because we can't get enough of the propeller!

@Chip Gracey from Parallax is joining us today

Chip Gracey Hello, Everyone.

@Chip Gracey can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on? Well...I've been into electronics since I was about 10. Self taught. Started Parallax right after high school with a friend from junior high. Parallax slowly grew to look like a company.

Chip Gracey What else? Ah, working on a new chip called the Propeller II. It has sixteen 32-bit cores and has been much designed by the community on the Parallax forums.

Chip Gracey I've been busy in Verilog for most of the last 17 years.

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Chip Gracey Will the new chip br compatible with Blocklyprop?

Chip Gracey Anyone can ask me anything, if there's something they're interested in.

Chip Gracey Yes, we will make a BlocklyProp front end for it.

Jon McPhalen Can the P2 do set-and-forget fixed-frequency, variable duty-cycle PWM? I use counter updates in a loop now -- would love to dump the loop.

Chip Gracey @Jon, yes. Each pin has a brain of its own.

Jon McPhalen I've been so busy coding the P1 that I haven't kept up with the P2. Can go into more detail about the "smart" IO pins?

Chip Gracey By starting up the smart pins on the same cycle, any number of them can be synchronized.

Chip Gracey Ok...

JDat Please tell more about "pin brains".

Chip Gracey says:3:10 PM

Let me get something I can paste here...

// %MMMMM: 00000 = smart pin off (default)

// 00001 = long repository (P[12:10] != %101)

// 00010 = long repository (P[12:10] != %101)

// 00011 = long repository (P[12:10] != %101)

// 00001 = DAC noise (P[12:10] = %101)

// 00010 = DAC 16-bit dither, noise (P[12:10] = %101)

// 00011 = DAC 16-bit dither, PWM (P[12:10] = %101)

// 00100* = pulse/cycle output

// 00101* = transition output

// 00110* = NCO frequency

// 00111* = NCO duty

// 01000* = PWM triangle

// 01001* = PWM sawtooth

// 01010* = PWM switch-mode power supply, V and I feedback

// 01011 = periodic/continuous, A-B quadrature encoder

// 01100 = periodic/continuous, inc on A-high

// 01101 = periodic/continuous, inc on A-rise

// 01110 = periodic/continuous, inc on A-high, dec on B-high

// 01111 = periodic/continuous, inc on A-rise, dec on B-rise

// 10000 = time A states

// 10001 = time A highs

// 10010 = time X A-highs

// 10011 = for X periods, count time

// 10100 = for X periods, count states

// 10101 = for periods in X+ clocks, count time

// 10110 = for periods in X+ clocks, count states

// 10111 = for periods in X+ clocks, count periods

// 11000* = USB host, low-speed (even/odd pin pair = DM/DP)

// 11001* = USB host, high-speed (even/odd pin pair = DM/DP)

// 11010* = USB device, low-speed (even/odd pin pair = DM/DP)

// 11011* = USB device, high-speed (even/odd pin pair = DM/DP)

// 11100* = sync serial transmit (A-data, B-clock)

// 11101 = sync serial receive (A-data, B-clock)

// 11110* = async serial transmit (baudrate)

// 11111 = async serial receive (baudrate)

Shantam Raj You said u have busy with Verilog for 17 years..... i myself wanted to get started with FPGAs and verilog, what do u think is the best way to do that, any good resources out there. I have a background in electronics so i am not really looking for basic stuff as i think i can get it over with in short while. I am looking for medium level to advanced level stuff like designing processors.

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Chip Gracey Will it be introduced on a board like the PABWX or as a microcontroller only such as the FLiP?

Joshua ReisenauerHow random is that noise?

Arsenijs Added my (quite uninformed) question to the spreadsheet, hopefully you'll get to it eventually =)

Charles Eric LaForest Is the USB and USART in hardware, for each smart pin?

Chip Gracey @Shantam Raj, I would get any sub-$50 board and start to learn with it. Hardware description is the ultimate frontier in digital design. Anything you can dream up, you can implement.

Chip Gracey @Carol Lynn Hazlett , We'll have various boards, for sure.

Chip Gracey @Joshua Reisenauer , It's VERY random. We are using a PRNG topology called "xoroshiro128+" that's passed quality tests out to 256TB. It's simple, too!

RoGeorge @Chip Gracey Wow, those sart pins looks amazing. How many of them can be smart simultanuously, please?

Hey everyone, let's take turns on the questions :)

Benchoff ^ Listen to your moderator

going back to @Shantam Raj question

Chip Gracey @Joshua Reisenauer , we also seed the PRNG with thermal-noise+process+voltage+temperature-variant input. It's pretty random

Nice.Shantam Raj says:3:11 PM

You said u have busy with Verilog for 17 years..... i myself wanted to get started with FPGAs and verilog, what do u think is the best way to do that, any good resources out there. I have a background in electronics so i am not really looking for basic stuff as i think i can get it over with in short while. I am looking for medium level to advanced level stuff like designing processors.

also ties in with the first question on the sheet: how did you get started in electronics

Chip Gracey @RoGeorge , they call all run concurrently. Each has separate hardware.Carol asks: Will you ever bring back the Propeller Developer Board or something similiar to it?

Ken Gracey

NICEJon Thomasson wow!

Chip Gracey @Sophi Kravitz, I'm partial to the Altera (now Intel) stuff. Get yourself some cheap FPGA board and jump in. Verilog is terse, like C. I didn't like it, at first, but I love it nowadays.

ischainmail shiney

Ken Gracey @Arsenijs I've attached a photo of the latest product to go to production, last week in the UK. Common applications are in security, robotics, renewable energy, and from Parallax itself.

RoGeorge How many are them (smart pins) on the chip, please?

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Ken Gracey My pre-order is in now!Michael asks: Apart from the Propeller-2 and building a family (of course!), what has been the most exciting and rewarding project you've worked on.

Chip Gracey @Carol Lynn Hazlett, we could, I suppose, but Ken decides what we are making, board wise, for the most part.

Chip Gracey @RoGeorge, there are 64 pins and they are all smart. They are also analog. They have 150-ohm and 1k-ohm 8-bit DACs and sigma-delta ADCs, plus an 8-bit level comparator.

Ken Gracey @Carol Lynn Hazlett We will make whatever you will buy. It could be that we offer a few simple modules from Parallax ('specially for BlocklyProp and education), plus whatever Chip needs for development. Ideally, P2 will take flight and others will make the boards too.

Jon McPhalen Will Parallax provide a file system object for the P2? I would love to have multiple files open -- especially audio files for props and displays. The P1 file object (FSRW) works well, but doesn't support multiple files (which may be tough with only 32K, anyway).

RoGeorge Thank you, I'll order!

Chip Gracey everything has been a lot of fun. It was fun to get the Prop1 done, as it was a full-custom chip. I designed my own RAMs, ROMs, PLL's, logic, I/O pads, etc. That was a big project. It took 8 years. The Prop2 has been going on for 11 now, and I think it's done.

Chip Gracey @Jon McPhalen, I hope to see that, but I'm not sure if some user will write it, or we'll do it. SD cards are certainly in the future for it, as they are used with Prop1, already.

JDat Chip! Not counting forum members, who also work on P2 hardware and software? For example like a full day job.

Chip Gracey @JDat, it's just me. We had a layout engineer for a long time, but I couldn't keep him busy enough.

A combined question from @Joshua Reisenauer and @JDat, re: Prop2, looks like you answered this already :: What is the current prop-2 hardware status, and how you think the prop-2 will stack up against other microcontrollers.

Chip Gracey people always ask me if the Prop2 will be obsolete when it's done, since it's been so long in the making..

Chip Gracey My answer is that it is something new that lets you work in a different way. Most of the microcontroller world has gone the ARM direction, it seems....

Chip Gracey ARM is all about running compiled C code and having tight real-time processes handled by silicon peripherals....

To get it to do something a few degrees off from its intended use may be about impossible...

ARM is all about running compiled C code and having tight real-time processes handled by silicon peripherals....

The prop2 will not make the prop1 obsolete will it? I already have been doing several projects with the FLiP and am not ready for it's demise. It is a great little Package.

The Prop2 is very flexible, like an FPGA, with maybe macros to handle common things like math operations. You are able to program it to have Nth-cycle repeatability...

Joshua Reisenauer I hear the P2 might support bytecode, will it be capable of instruction translation/emulation?

Ken Gracey @Carol Lynn Hazlett Parallax still sells BASIC Stamp 1s (1992). P1 obsolescence would only happen if no customers bought it (or if the fab discontinued the process we use). No time soon. Many of us - including you and I - haven't used P1's capabilities in entirety.

Chip Gracey @Joshua Reisenauer, I just added a feature to the Prop2 that, in six clocks, can fetch a byte from hub memory, look it up in the local LUT RAM, and jump to code within the cog (processor) memory with a SKIP pattern, where it jumps over unwanted instructions. It means efficient bytecode execution for custom bytecode engines.

Chip Gracey I don't think the Prop2 will obsolete the Prop1. They are different animals.

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Ken Gracey I still use my Basic Stamps for some things.

Chip Gracey I also added instructions the other day for fetching, in two clocks, 1..4 bytes from hub RAM, based on the MSBs of the upcoming bytes. So, it's a data-driven word fetcher.

Jon McPhalen I program BASIC Stamp 1s and BASIC Stamp 2s nearly every day for customers who still love them.

Chip Gracey @Jon McPhalen, this year, the BASIC Stamp is 24 years old. The BASIC Stamp II is 22 years old.

Jon McPhalen @Chip Gracey Does that mean PASM code will exist in the hub that way it's organized in P1 LMM code now?

Al Williams Geez that makes me feel old @Chip Grace

Jon McPhalen @Chip Gracey I started programming the BASIC Stamp 1 in 1994 and have almost every day since

Patrick Van Oosterwijck Props for offering a different way to do things (pun intended). How is the low power story with Prop2?

Chip Gracey @Jon McPhalen, the bytecode engine is for custom bytecode schemes. You write code that runs in the cog which handles the bytecodes.

Chip Gracey @Patrick Van Oosterwijck, I'm estimating that the Prop2 will dissipate up to 2W with everything running. That's a limitation of the fab process, 180nm, which is 19 years old, but Parallax can afford to use. It costs about $250 to get to production if your Verilog is done.

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Jon McPhalen Me too Jon, though lately I have been going crazy on the FLiP. I did not realize it has been over 20 years.

Chip Gracey They are estimating that to make a reasonably-complex chip in 5nm is going to require a $500M investment. There are only a few companies in the world that can afford that. Samsung, Apple, ???

Patrick Van Oosterwijck @Chip Gracey Are there "low power modes"?

Charles Eric LaForest 250$?! That's not a typo?

Chip Gracey @Patrick Van Oosterwijck, yes, you can slow it way down to 20KHz, internally, but there is going to be about 1ma of quiescent leakage that won't go away.

Joshua Reisenauer 250$ is for a small batch, right?

Chip Gracey Ah, instead of $250, I meant to say that it costs $250K to get a 180nm chip into production.

Charles Eric LaForest ah. Still, that's quite cheap relatively speaking. cool.

Chip Gracey It's too bad that smaller processes are SO expensive. Even 28nm is maybe $3M today.

Benchoff dreams and hopes were dashed by the omission of the letter K....

Chip Gracey Transistors are cheaper than ever, but to get there is more expensive than ever.

Joshua Reisenauer Has the Fab process for 180nm gotten any cheaper over the years?

Al Williams No doubt @Benchoff I was halfway through a new business plan

Chip Gracey @Benchoff, I know. It's kind of frustrating.

Chip Gracey @Joshua Reisenauer, yes. It used to cost $600k for the masks. Today it's about $130k.

Chip Gracey It's stressful to design for an event, in which the chip works or it doesn't, but hopefully works enough to be able to fix what's wrong.Eric asks: What experiences or applications led you to select the particular instruction set of Propeller-2?

Chip Gracey I've been programming in assembly for what seems like forever. So, I have always wished for this and that. Now, I get to implement all those ideas.

Jon McPhalen The P2 is faster and has more RAM than the P1, right?

Charles Eric LaForest Nice. Thanks. There are so many ideas implied in all those features and instructions.

Chip Gracey @Jon McPhalen, yes. The Prop2 will have 512KB of hub RAM and each processor has 4KB of dual-port RAM. Compare that to the Prop1's 32KB/2KB.

@ajsaenz asks: How do you cordinate data exchange between processor cores and avoid race conditions?

Jon McPhalen Nice. I've never pushed cog RAM very far, but my current laser tag project is nearly filling 32K of P1 hub.

Chip Gracey Programming in assembly can be fun and really liberating. I've tried to make our assembly language like a playground. Modern architectures tend to be hideous, as the only consideration for their assembly language is C-compiler targetting.

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Chip Gracey One of the best things about Parallax is the excellent documentation and tutorials provided which allow home hobbyists like me to get up and running quickly. Will you have that for the newer chips also? I ask because I know the cost of providing that kind of documentation is going up.

Chip Gracey @ajsaenz, we have a spoke system, where the main RAMs rotate against the 16 processors. Each of the 16 RAMs is responsible for a particular LONG. To read LONGs in sequence, you wait for the starting RAM to come by, and then start reading. You can read/write one long on each clock. Every processor can do that, concurrently!

JDat From my standpoint P1 assembler is the easiest assembles I ever seen.

@Chip Gracey made great job!

Chip Gracey Programming SHOULD be fun. It's a venue for learning analogs to everything in the physical world.

Chip Gracey It's nice when things work consistently, too. Today, there is a plague of flakiness that affects almost everything. The Propeller idea is to seek safe haven.Do you have a link to a document that describes P2 in detail?

@Ken GraceyChip Gracey Here is the top of the Prop2 forum thread where I keep links to the current doc's: http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/162298/prop2-fpga-files-updated-10-april-2017-version-18a/p1

JDat says:3:51 PM

@RoGeorge asks: Estimated price for 1k pcs retail, please? In the posted pic is a DIL40 package. Will there be other packages available?

Ken Gracey @Chip Gracey can you get @Sophi Kravitz a link to your documentation? Also, there's a wealth of detail here http://forums.parallax.com/categories/propeller-2-multicore-microcontroller too.

Chip Gracey @JDat, I think we will probably sell the Prop2 at 1k pieces for around $6..$8, maybe less. Not sure, yet.

Ken Gracey@RoGeorge we are fabless and quite truthfully low-volume in comparison to the big boys, which makes the per-unit cost higher than you'd expect.

Chip Gracey The Prop2 die is huge. It's 8.5mm x 8.5mm, which is a lot of silicon. That's needed for easy programming, though, where you can keep adding without breaking what's already working.

Arsenijs "Common applications are in security, robotics, renewable energy, and from Parallax itself."

JDat What about IC packages? As I remember from forums, there is no DIP40. QFN 80 package?

Chip Gracey The Propeller is like a solution floating around, ready to address problems. It's not targeted at any specific market, but at PEOPLE

RoGeorge price per pcs will be great, too, sure

Chip Gracey We'll package Prop2 into an exposed-pad TQFP-100 that's 14 x 14mm.

RoGeorge is there yet an estimated price 1 pcs?

Carol Lynn Hazlett @Chip Gracey It is a perfect chip for hobby robotics

Chip Gracey @RoGeorge, $10, I suppose. If it's worthy, you will develop a long-term relationship with it. Your time spent on it will be valued in the $10k's..$100k's.

JDat BTW: I am ready to pay 15$ for 1 pc when ordering from mouser/digikey/farnell etc

We're going to start wrapping up here, last call for questions

!RoGeorge Thank you!

Joshua Reisenauer Thank you sir.

Chip GraceyThanks for your interest, Everyone!

knikula enjoyed it!

Charles Eric LaForestThank you.

Seairth Jacobs@Chip Gracey never mind what the P2 can be use for by others, what do *you* hope to use it for?Mike Szczys says:3:59 PM

Thank you very much, I really enjoyed hearing about Propeller II development!JDat says:3:59 PM

Ir was awose to Meet @Chip Gracey , @Ken Gracey and @Jon McPhalen ! Thank you for your time!

Arsenijs Thank you very much for your answers!

Jordan Bunker Thank you, @Chip Gracey !

M.daSilva Thank you!

Chip Gracey @Seairth, I want to synthesize choral music from only hundreds of bytes of data. I love signal synthesis

Chip Gracey Thanks, Sophi, for putting this together.

Sophi Kravitz It was great having you, come back again!

RoGeorge Most interesting and anImated chat so far, @Chip Gracey , thank you

Chip Gracey Thank you! Goodbye for now. Looking forward to more someday, hopefully soon