BASIC Stamp 2

[Maintenance Man]

I have been involved with PLCs for over 11 years now. Ihave found a BASIC Stamp 2 kit in which I would like to learn to program. The class I am taking had a section in the book that talked about the Basic stamp. The instructor thought we did not need to learn about this, but I feel it would not have been in the book if it was not important. I would like some feed back on this as to how important in the electronics field it is to learn basic stamp programing and beyond? Thank you all for your help.

[Maintenance Man]

The teacher last year is no longer with the school. The reason he did not have us learn Basic Stamp was because it would not help us learn to fix things. I stongly beleive that if you learn something, it can help you with something else to have a better understanding of it. Thank you all.

[keithkyll]

There's better forums for the stamp. The Basic stamp has 8 I/O. The BS2 came out later. 16 I/O, more features, higher price. It's the best platform to start learning. The BS1 is limited by comparison, and more time consuming. Don't worry about the BS1 for now - you aren't missing anything.

[bikerdude]

MM,
I found that learning the BStamp education routines helped me to learn the basics of electronic components & their properties. I also learned a lot about organizing subroutines in programs to aid efficiency & priorities.
I highly recommend the basic stamp board of education or what ever its called these days, along with one of the hardware kits. Or do the Boe-Bot kit & get most of whats needed for $159. You can do all the experiments at home on weekends or nights.

BD

[kolyur]

I used a Basic Stamp some years ago when I was first learning about all this control stuff. It's a great introduction to embedded controllers for beginners. Since the Stamp is a "board level" component, you may end up also learning about things like circuit board design, soldering, resistors and caps, serial data transfer, power management, etc... These skills have benefited me numerous times in my day-to-day work.

If you find the subject matter interesting, you may want to migrate into true microcontroller chips like the Freescale HCS08 (my personal favorite) or Microchip PIC (the most popular). It's amazing how much functionality they can pack into a device that only costs a few bucks.