Customer Reviews

The Microcontroller Application Cookbook, Vol 2. with BASIC Stamp 2 Homework Board

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As advertised, has a selection of partial circuits that can be combined together to give you ideas for projects. Refers back to book one for several of the circuits in book two, so be careful there. The circuit is a Basic Stamp Homework Board, which you can buy separately from Parallax if you want to, though the price bundled with the book isn't bad. The Homework Board has the guts of the stamp built into the board, though, so if you blow it you'd either have to resolder the component or buy a new board. As far as I can tell, there are built in resistors on each of the I/O lines, so there's less chance you'll do that. It comes packaged in a static bag that contains the board and 4 rubber feet that adhere to the bottom of the board. There's also a flyer directing you to Parallax's website for documentation; their website is a little cluttered and kind of hard to find. You'll need to buy a serial cable -- one gotcha is that it can't be a null modem cable; it *must* be a cable where all the pins are routed through. (I spent several hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong before I realized that was the problem.) Also, I went to a local radio supply store and bought a static mat and a static wrist bracelet so I don't zap my investment.

The example programs that are provided with the circuits are usually pretty useless and repetetive. Most of the time, they're a small loop that toggles a pin or checks a pin before printing a debug message. Though it takes up space, they don't really detract from the book that much.

Something bad about the books is that there is some repetition of the circuits. Given that the books are so small, you'd think they'd be able to come up with unique circuits for every page, but no dice.

Let's see.. I also am using Linux software (bstamp) to program and debug the stamp, which works. I had to download the source and apply a two-line patch. If you're not comfortable rebuilding source or modifying C code, then I'd stick with windows. The Linux stuff doesn't seem to be very actively developed anymore (though it works).

Overall, this board and books (I bought the first book as well) were good. They give you maybe 20 or 25 partial circuits for $20 (at the time I bought it). I think that the Basic Stamp2 processors let me ignore the circuitry that's required to run the processor, but due to the cost (like $30-$50), I won't be buying another. It is a quick and easy way to get playing.