Micro-Computing
The evening’s first speaker was Andrew Lindsay from Parallax, Inc. He was introduced by Ken Hopkins, who revealed that he was the first person to buy one of Parallax’s BASIC Stamp modules from their office, which was on Auburn Boulevard at the time. (The company is now located in Rocklin.)
"I never really used it," Ken said. "I learned from it, but I never used it for a real project. Many years later, I did a project for someone. Have you ever been in, I guess it is Safeway, where they have the thunder and lightning around the grocery thing. Well, I did one of those with a BASIC stamp for someone for a high-class pet store where they are using it for a tropical rain forest. They configure through a little keypad how often they want it to run; I think they settled on every 15 minutes, every 15 minutes they get a thunderstorm, and then the mist starts on top of their trees and that kind of stuff. I used a BASIC stamp for that. It was a fun application to do."
The Automatic Coffin
"And then," Ken added, "I used it for one of my Halloween skits. I used it for automating a coffin, it triggered a pneumatic valve, it opened a coffin really slowly and then triggered a sound and then slammed the coffin lid shut."
[Ken is known for his elaborate Halloween pranks. –Ed.]
"This is really the way to learn computers," Ken said. "You can work these PCs all you want, and that teaches you how to use Windows, but it does not teach you anything at all about computers. This gets you closer to the metal. You can actually learn about computers and how to do them."
Lindsay began by pointing out that all the software, documentation, source code, books, and other material that is on their CD is also available for free download from their Web page.
He held up a small circuit board module and said, "This is the BASIC Stamp. It got its name because it is a postage stamp-size computer, and it really has the same shape as a commemorative postage stamp, and you can program it in BASIC.
"It is programmed in PBASIC, which is a Parallax version of the BASIC programming language. It has 2K of program memory, 26 bytes of RAM, and it executes 4,000 instructions per second. Now, some of you are probably wondering at this point, should I get rid of my desktop unit? I agree with you. Not yet, but only because you will need it to program a BASIC stamp."
Components of a BASIC Stamp
He pointed out a programmable interrupt controller (PIC) on the stamp, and "we took this and made it into something that could understand BASIC computer programs and by adding all of this other hardware on the BASIC stamp, it makes it so that virtually anybody can use it. Here is a memory chip that stores the programs that you can write, and it has a voltage regulator, and clock. The voltage regulator would be analogous to your computer internal power supply, The EE prom would be a lot like the hard disk; the 20 MHz resonator, which is right here, would be like the clock inside the computer. And then this PIC chip is actually like a combination of the CPU and the RAM. That is why we call it a single board computer, because here is a little tiny board, and it is an entire computer."
"Here is a little bit of information about what the BASIC stamp gets used for" Lindsay said. "I will start with education. The first thing it is used for is to teach beginner level computer programming, BASIC being one of the first languages that most folks studying any sort of computer programming learn. It really lends itself to that. It is also used for instruction in all levels of electronics, mechatronics, and robotics. I got my bachelors in electrical engineering, and the second-to-last project that I turned in had a BASIC stamp at the core of it.
"It can also be used in academic research projects. I get a lot of calls from people who say something like, ‘I’ve got this project I need to have monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and none of my interns would be willing to do that.’ So a lot of researchers get referred to us because they hear that our product is easy to use to automate things like fish tanks and biological systems.
Embedded Systems
"In the hobby realm, the BASIC stamp gets used a lot for things like home automation. For those that are RC car, or airplane, or anything else enthusiasts, the BASIC stamp can give those things intelligence. You can program the BASIC stamp and embed it; if you’ve heard of embedded systems, this is what the BASIC stamp is mainly used for. You can embed it into something and make it intelligent. If you want your toaster to make decisions for you, program the BASIC stamp and embed it in the toaster. In fact, with microwave ovens, for example, there is a small computer inside of the microwave that is always checking to see if somebody hit a key on the keypad, and when that happens, it lights up different little lights on the display so that you can see the numbers. So that is BASIC stamp application.
Automating Weather Stations
"You can automate just about anything; weather stations are very popular, and there was a recent article about a parrot trainer in an electronics hobbyist magazine.
"In industry, which is our main market, if you want to make an electronics gizmo and it needs to be intelligent, the BASIC stamp was designed to talk to other electronic gizmos inside of that product, and it does a fantastic job of that.
"Process control, from factory to aerospace; specialized instruments: for example, biomedical especially, ‘I need a wheelchair, and I need to make sure it doesn’t bump into the walls for the person, and I need it to understand certain commands.’ Stuff like that, the BASIC stamp is used often in that. And animatronics, I get a lot of calls from people who say, ‘I’ve got these antennas on my Star Trek character and I want them to pulsate with light with a presumed heartbeat,’ so we’ll help them set that kind of thing up. It really is a lot of fun to do."
Lindsay said their CD, and the Web site, offer extensive educational materials on the nature of microcontrollers and how to use them to accomplish your goals. All the documents are available at www.stampsinclass.com.
Making a Working Stamp
He described how to put together the parts to make a working stamp set. "Basically after you have done a battery, cable, and BASIC stamp, and if you have one of those CDs, you can use the programming software to try your first program. Very quickly, there are kits that come along with each of these texts, and they are awfully nice to work with, it is a great way to learn electronics, it is a great way to learn sensors, BASIC computer programming, robotics, and a whole bunch of other things, and all of these are filled with really great concepts. They were all written with the idea of forwarding your knowledge toward a particular direction. The robotics text, for example, is full of engineering examples of how this robot is a microcosm of larger engineering schemes, and I think they pretty much all do that same kind of thing. And they are very step-by-step oriented.
"Here is an example from the very first book. It actually is an example that has two push buttons, and two light-emitting diodes. Here is an example of a program that gets downloaded onto the BASIC stamp to make this circuit work. Now, since this is a very beginner text, we also show actually show how to wire up the circuit on the prototyping area."
He connected a Stamp and used the CD to copy code to make a Basic program, but the program failed to work. After some investigation, he discovered he had made an error in the wiring, and after fixing it, was able to blink a light by pressing a button on the Stamp.
"What we just saw was the very beginning of the educational side of using the BASIC stamp. And here are some more advanced products. This is where the BASIC stamp is used to talk with other subsystems on a flying robot. And it controls switches, motors, and an interface to a GPS (Geographic Positioning System), and yes, the BASIC stamp can actually have conversations with those GPS units that some of you might have seen in fancy cars.
Stamps on the Space Shuttle
"What good would a slide show be without a picture of the Space Shuttle. But here is one. And that little arrow, from the BASIC stamp 2, is really pointing to a BASIC stamp. I zoomed up the photo, and it looks pretty much like a BASIC stamp. A lot of people submitted proposals for different experiments to send up in the Space Shuttle, and a group of students won, and so they used the BASIC stamp to automate this biology experiment in a weightless environment."
While demonstrating a robot, Lindsay said: "And here is some more stuff for hobbyists. One neat thing about the BASIC stamp is that without prior electronics experience you can take things like a hobbyist servo or speaker module, an LED push button pre-made thing, and the exact same unit that we used to display the board just a while ago, put them all together and make something. Here is something that our marketing director made. He is not a highly technical person, but he was able to go back to the shop and kind of make up a frame, then use the very simple programming language and some servos to make it move around. This is called the Toddler. And it really brings out the maternal instinct in many.
Trying Not to Bump Something
"He is walking forward. So let me see if I can make him turn around. He checks every few seconds to see if he is going to bump into anything.
"Ah, there we go. These little lights show that he finally saw something in front of him and they are not showing very well on the screen, but he did stop for a while, and he is attempting to turn now.
"He is working on it. This also really demonstrates how difficult it can be to try to mimic various human behaviors with machines. It is quite a task."
"Here is another commercial application. This is a remote weather station. Here is something that measures and logs all kinds of environmental occurrences, day and night, and it does it on its own. The BASIC stamp is inside there gathering information from sensors and recording it for later retrieval by somebody that will go over there and plug in, presumably, a laptop into it and get all of that information back.
"JP Aerospace is a company we sponsor. There is a contest to have a private company get a payload into space, a five-pound payload, and these guys are inflating a bunch of balloons, and then they are raising their rocket up to fairly close to the stratosphere before it actually launches. The BASIC Stamp that they are using in there, as this says, talks to GPS again, and apparently actuates a parachute and controls the direction the camera is looking, and engine control. That is really impressive. I didn’t know it did all of that. "
Experiment Number Six
Lindsay produced another robot. "This is the toy that our robotics students get to play with, and it is called the Boe-Bot. This one right here is experiment six from the new robotics text. And I think that you will notice that it is a lot quicker when recognizing obstacles. These little things are its infrared eyes, and if you place something in front of it, it will detect that and turn. The only exception is if it is a black object, like that notebook right there, that absorbs infrared so well that it might not register as an object. I will send this down the aisle. And they are pretty durable, so I wouldn’t worry about breaking it."
"Again, on that CD and on our Web site, there is a tremendous amount of information and some cool software that you can try out. We make all of this available at no charge simply because we do charge for the actual computer, the BASIC stamp. The least expensive one you can get is $29, and the ones that I have been demonstrating tonight cost $50, and this robotics kit is about $200 for the entire kit with all the experiments.
The reason we make our software and all of our documentation free is, first, it provides a great service to everybody out there, and second, because it encourages people after they see all of the things you can do with it to buy the computer, be it the $29 version, or the $50 version, or we have a few new slick $80 and $100 things coming out, so that is the sales pitch part of it."
Information Collecting
Russell Jacobsen of Gemteq Software demonstrated how to use eGems, an information collector. "The basic application is used for anything electronic, meaning text, images, links—anything like that," Jacobsen said.
"These days, as you all know, you do a search for something and you get plenty of information back. In an area like genealogy where you are doing some information gathering, you get a lot of good material, but it is kind of thrown at you in mass. What do you do with the good stuff out of the whole? How do you obtain it or how do you capture it and be able to reuse it later? That is what eGems’ purpose is, and it is going to be able to help you do that in a lot of different fashions.
"eGems is a very small application, and it floats on top of your other applications. That’s because as you are capturing things out of the Internet, or e-mails, or documents off your computer, you do not want to be switching back and forth. This uses drag-and-drop, so when you find something of value to your research, just drag-and-drop it in and capture it.
Collecting Web URLs
"Say you did a search and you found a fantastic Web site on whatever your topic may be. You have a few options, one of which is to bookmark the whole site and come back to it later. Although you end up with a favorites folder that is just gargantuan, and you don’t know why you chose some of those URLs to save.
"Another thing you can do is and paste into a Word document or whatever. But what you are not doing is tracking where it came from. A few months down the road you’ll wonder, ‘Oh, where did I get that image from.’ EGems lets you go back to that source, it is going to track when you obtained it. I am going to pull into this gem an encapsulated piece of information: pieces of information that can help you track even bibliography information on what you’ve collected."
Jacobsen right-clicked on eGems and created "a new chest, and we are going to call it ‘Trip to Spain,’ to serve my purposes.
Planning a Trip
"We are going to start out by planning my trip to Spain." He brought up the Lonely Planet Web site ("I have traveled quite a bit, in Asia and South America, and always buy their hard copy. They have fantastic travel guides, but they have a pretty good online Web site as well.")
"What I am going to show you is how to start capturing pieces of information from a Web site. If we wanted this map, you would just tick it, drag-and-drop it in. If you hold it down over this icon, it will pull down the menu for you. And you can store it where you want to put it.
"Now when you have captured that piece of info this window pops up. It has got three tabs. One is the general tab, which allows you to name it, and actually I’ll just name it ‘map.’ You can take some notes here [in another box], and this is useful for those of you doing any type of research, or where you are trying to categorize or track other things. It tells you where it is located.
"The bibliography tab is the next one over. A lot of times some of this information will come automatically. EGems does the best job it can of going into the tags of the source and pulling information if it is provided. Lonelyplanet doesn’t provide author, publication date, and that kind of thing. It does provide article title, it tells you where you are picking it up from. This you may have to key in manually.
Saving and Formatting Information
"As you save it you are able to also store it later in a format that you select. That way, when you reuse this piece of information, it is going to format it for you in that form. We are also tracking the date that we obtained it. These are all changeable. And the URL file path. Later on, when you need to find out where you got this piece of info, you just hit "go" and you are back on to that site. So it is tracking all of that for you."
"Last but not least," Jacobsen noted, "is the view, what you captured. When we click on ‘OK,’ it is storing all of that in an encapsulated gem, and it is compressing anything over a certain file size. The compression ratio is up to the user.
"Quite obviously, this has imitated what a copy and paste would do, so you have captured that map even if the Web site is down."
Jacobsen pointed out how the program allowed him to choose only some of the information from a Web page, instead of having to save the entire page. And, he said, once saved, the data can be manipulated easily.
Recipe Collecting
"My mom does recipe collecting off of the Internet," he said. "She actually went to a culinary academy and everything. And so she shares recipes with friends and she will pull stuff out of e-mails and store them as gems. So she has got a chest [in her eGems program] titled Italian dishes, and within that she has got all of these different things stored, and when she wants a certain recipe, she will just open up that gem and hit print directly from there."
"We can also gather URLs, and that would obviously be for the purpose of being able to reuse them to visit sites. Anywhere you can put a cursor is basically where you can get or reuse this information."
Jacobsen went on to describe some of the options from the top menu.
"You can create a new gem from scratch in case you have an idea all of a sudden, or maybe you are planning your trip somewhere and you remember that someone told you to go to these ruins so you can store that information, too."
"You can do a full screen capture. I’ve used this quite a few times in preparing presentations. This says two seconds after you close this dialog, the active window is going to be captured. So you highlight the window you wanted to be captured. We say OK, wait a few seconds, and it says activating gems. It tells me it is capturing the active window. And that is saved as a bitmap."
Because eGems always sits on top of the desktop, it can be minimized down into just an icon, Jacobsen said, and items captured by dragging-and-dropping onto the icon. "In that case it’s saved in an ‘unfilled’ chest by default," he added, but that can be changed.
Collecting with a Pen
Jacobsen said the company has been partnering with other firms to increase the functionality of eGems, and showed how you can scan text with Quick Link Pen and convert it into text that can be used on your PC. It could even be beamed into a laptop, he said.
"And then of course you can just create a new chest or a new tray from scratch. There is no restriction on how many chests or trays you can have. And you can also set up multiple databases.
"A few of my databases are very large." Using the program’s find feature, "you an define your search to match any words, match all words, and use entire sentences or phrases."
The options menu allows setting personal preferences, like whether to display the floating window open or as an icon and what compression level to use.
The program supports multiple databases, so every family member can have their own database.
He also said the company has begun pre-compiling entire databases of information, like "Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Mark Twain’s maxims, the Constitution of the United States; we have the entire Bible as a database."
Although the program allows locking chests, the protection is not encrypted, Jacobsen said. A server-based version is under development that will allow encryption, administrative supervision, and the like.
The help menu "will take you online and give you a tutorial, as well as the full manual, which is in electronic form."
Besides pre-compiled databases available on the company’s Web site, the company offers a free eGems viewer, which will let you read but not save information.
