Remembering the first day...

Earlier I stated that working with the propeller was "fun". I think back to first power-on of this device (late Nov 2007, Rev A1 board). The night before, I had completed the soldering of all the parts, studied the board for bad/missed solder joints... and then I cleaned and dried the board.

After letting it sit over-night I finished work, came home and grabbed the new board and cabled it up (plugged it into USB on my Dell XPS Gen4.) I keep the audio on when I'm working with new USB devices so I heard the now overly-familiar "bing" when the new device was added and I saw that the FTDI chip was recognized. Watching my new device I happily see the USB Tx/Rx led's flashing. All of a sudden I stop. "What code can I run to exercise something?"

After a moment of thought, I remembered the simple code for LED flashing found in the Propeller Manual so I reached for the book and started thumbing through it. After a little bit of hurried keying and looking up to which ports I attached the error and warning LEDs I then had some code which should work.

About this time my son walks in about to ask me something (its always something technical but some topic which I never seem to able to predict. ;-) I hold up my hand in a "please-wait" plea and I tell the Propeller tool to download the code to RAM and run it.

Both of us were amazed when it did and then it really did. It found the device and downloaded and verified the code and then it really did toggle the LED! Now that's fun! Having the board turn on so quickly!

In the midst of this "rush" of success I then pressed ^F11 to download to EEPROM. Again, it worked! I gotta say, for my own cobbled together schematic, doing board layout after carefully choosing parts, order the parts and boards, cutting out one of the boards from the rest in the panel and then soldering all the parts and then to see it "just work" I was stunned. This all happened so fast that I wasn't prepared to do anything next. I turned around to my Son we both reveled in how fast this came up and then I talked to him about subject he needed to address when he came into my work-room in the first place.

So, yes this propeller is fun! Many aspects of it are new (e.g., architecture, tool-set, microcode-like assembly language) and it's easy to interface devices to it. What a great "day two" with the Rev A.1 board! Thanks Parallax, this is great fun!