ColorPAL and Picaxe

kando

Senior Member
Hi,
It's been a long time since I posted something so I was looking at doing something with colour sensors and came across the Parallax ColorPAL sensor and wondered if it would work with the Picaxe chips.
It turns out that WestAust55 did some work helping someone back in 2012. I found the useful pamphlet tutorial and as I had ordered the ColorPAL and was waiting I thought I'd better bone up on things to do with it.
Took me a while, but got to the stage of referring back and forth from Parallax documentation and Westy's. I got the ColorPAL and tried to get it going. Failed. kind of worked once then nothing.

I tried to re-program the 18m2 and all I got was "can't find hardware" error from PE.

I thought at first it was the serial lead.. checked... no problem. I thought it might be the chip. So changed it for 20X2.. thought it might be USB3 and cable not working with driver problem swapped computer to USB2... same thing happened. kind of worked once then failed same error.

Back to the tutorials. Nothing came to light. I then thought make my own pamphlet with westy's info and Parallax info and stuff I had found put it into one and see if on the way I could solve the problem.

Yes, solved. I had not broken the 18M2 or 20X2. Here is what happened.

It turns out that if you program the Picaxe with commands for the colorPAL before it is set for direct commands it just hangs the Picaxe.

I had to power-up the picaxe and click the clear program button just after to clear the program from the Picaxe. This worked and no more errors.

Lesson learned. Found the info in the Parallax info which was a bit gobbledegook.

Any way having solved the problem was able to program the little blighter in any way now which is good because I have to use it for a project.

I am posting the adjusted Westy/Parallax/Kando version here for anyone else thinking of using one. (it is a good little product). (Hope you don't mind Westy).
 

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