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[Dr Who]

Hello!

At Maker Faire this past September I had a chance to discuss the peculiarities behind the hardware chosen in his four books, with the Maker named in the book as an author:

http://www.makershed...r-amateur-space

It seems he has an issue with an also-ran that surfaced well after the BASIC Stamp. (They use the same processor) He's more at home with the convoluted language that the Arduino uses as sketches. I'm convinced that the Netduino can do that better, also the Raspberry Pi, but that's a subject for a different site.

 

So has anyone considered that idea? What happened, and what was the outcome?

 

Visiting the Space Agency's booth, which is where he was standing, I saw one of their sats, it was a mockup of one of their cubesats, specifically the one who convinced and confused a smartphone to travel to space. It was lousy with batteries, specifically the 3.7 volt Li-ion 18650 cell specie.

 

And the issue? It seems he doesn't like BASIC.

 

[jinzai]

I think you might be offended unnecessarily -- he probably was referring to BASIC of the same type as the BASIC stamp uses, which is a linear, single threaded language with little in the way of system level OS to help it. Systems used extra-terrestrially need more -- redundancy, independent threads of execution, a reliable operating system (RTOS) and more stringent specifications.

 

Raspberry PI uses Linux, so it is natural to see a lot of C/C++ in there -- those languages favor a layer of system specific libraries that BASIC does not. Netduino leverages .NET and that has threading, asynchronous operation and many other features, not the least of which is Visual Studio for development tasks.

 

It ought to make you happy that Netduino can use VisualBASIC, at least.

 

 

Systems in the past did use microcontrollers like the 8031/51....maybe even the 8052, which as you probably already know -- has a BASIC interpreter built-in. Most systems developed using US government funds necessarily use highly proprietary programmable logic, like PGAs and more sophisticated programmable digital logic. Some of the US Navy's computers have replaceable microcode boards -- you actually swap out processor instruction sets according to your need.

 

In 2013, I was alerted to a job opportunity for a major NASA contractor that wanted Parallax Propeller experience. Of course, SPIN is very much C-like and not BASIC, but the Propeller has 8 "cogs", so it is actually better than multiple threads of execution. The Propeller is simply amazing to me -- I really like that chip a lot.

 

Most of these hobbyist systems never get reliable enough to make the cut because there is not enough money to support the hardware and firmware development cycles to a sufficient level of completion. That is a curse in consumer electronics, in my opinion. Companies like Parallax are challenging that -- the Propeller is 100% in-house designed there at Parallax. (Chip Gracey)

 

So, maybe that is your task -- legitimize the BASIC language for use in serious microcontroller applications beyond Cosplay and blinky light demos. I would be willing to ply the Netduino 3 with VisualBASIC.NET -- it would be easy for me to convert what I have done in C# and my day job is VB.NET all day, every day. I don't think that a typical implementation of BASIC can do that. (Because of the restrictions I mentioned above -- single thread, no events or interrupts, lack of fault tolerance -- etc.)

 

I am going to buy those books, though...you have piqued my interest in this...thanks.

 

Happy Coding!