Journey of a Software Developer

What is this? It’s a Basic Stamp Microcontroller board that is manufactured by Parallax, Inc.  Some of you may not know; but I originally got started with Programming as a Electronics Engineering student in college. Electronics was my first love.  However, when I graduated the market demands were for programmers and not electronic engineers so I decided to go where the demands were. This was over  6 years ago and I pretty much forgot everything, so I figured I would re-teach myself the basics of electronics and learn how to program microcontrollers in the process. I did have some experience programming the Motorola 68000 which were found in the early Apple computers. But, I wanted something that was a little easier to set up and have a better programming environment. The 68000 chip had to be programmed using Assembly Language and a EEPROM programmer. But of course, I didn’t want to go back to using Assembly Language after writing C# for all these years. To program the Basic Stamp all you need is a PC and a serial port. I do have to learn a new language called PBASIC, which looks as feel a lot like the original BASIC language. To start of with, I would advise anyone to purchase the Basic Stamp Activity Kit as it includes everything (except the 9V battery) you need to get started with.  The documentation is very easy to read and they have a great forum you can use to post any questions that you may have.

In my next post, I would like to have at least 1 project completed and I will take some pictures of the circuit board layout and post the code for you to see how easy it is. Obviously, the more complex circuit you have, the more code you have to write. So, I will start off with something simple.  Hopefully, this post has inspired you to start a new adventure in any area of your life. This is one adventure that I hope I can keep up with until something else comes along :-).  Until next time…

Happy Coding!