To give you a very dirty idea of where this board fits in the scheme of things…
A generic ranking:
(1)Modern PC
(2)Gumstix/ARM7 microcontroller
(3)dsPIC (there’s one on this board)
(4)PIC18F (there’s one on this board) *
(5)PIC16F **
(6)PIC12F
*The ATOM PRO is one of these.
**The ATOM and STAMP are examples of these.
Modern PC’s, and very very advanced micros, like the ARM7 use 32-bit architecture.
dsPIC use 16-bit architecture.
18F and below uses 8-bit architecture.
How many bits you’ve got determines the overall precision of your micro, as well as a few other nice things.
For instance, 32-bit micro can hold a decimal number of up to 4.3 billion in a single assembly instruction.
So, the dsPIC on the board is very respectable.
I wouldn’t use it for complicated audio/video processing, but it can certaintly keep up with just about any other task you throw at it.
Even the 18F micro is very respectable, and it’d be a very noticeable improvement over the STAMP that you’ve been using.
Yup.
It’s just a very nice breakout board for two microcontrollers.
The neat of this board is not that it’s got one fast micro.
Other boards have that feature
The neatest part is being able to do true multitasking, as there are now two processors.
So, if you need to keep very accurate timing of two operations (which is very hard to do with one micro) you can have the dsPIC time one and the 18F seperately time the other.
Certaintly not.
Controlling this beastie with an ABB or any other similar micro seems rather silly.
Can you give me a few examples of its use to help me understand its potential?
Sure…
One use:
Do anything you’re already doing with your STAMP, but do it 12X faster.
What I’ll be doing with it:
Using 13 regular I/O pins to control a seperate dual-channel speed controller that I’m building.
4 of those pins need to be turned on and off at very exact rates or the speed controller will short out and die.
1 ADC pin will be used with thermistor to monitor the temperature of the speed controller.
4 ADC pins will be used to monitor the battery levels of all four bot batteries: 9V (logic), 12V (speed controller), 30V (motor 1), and 30V (motor 2).
1 ADC to measure sound loudness
3 interupt pins to determine sound speed and then calculate direction
3 ADC to measure analog output of sonar rangefinders
3 MOSFET switches to control power to each laser pointer
3 regular I/O to control servos
5 MOSFET switches to control power to each voltage regulator on the bot
2 serial pins (TX and RX) for communication to WiPort
1 MOSFET switch to control power to WiPort
1 I2C pin to speak to the other micro
1 interupt pin to say “yo, wake up!” to other micro
Whew.
That’s a lot.
And guess what…
That’s just what I expect my 18F micro to be doing!
I’ll eventually use the dsPIC for camera post-processing (it’ll interpret data sent back from RoboRealm software), and, perhaps, to do the audio timing, since it’s so fast and precise.
The 18F could certaintly do both of those as well as what it’s already doing above, but it’s a lot easier to break the code up into two more manageable pieces and stick one in each micro.