Picaxe or BASIC Stamp?

masterchief1517

New Member
I've use BASIC Stamps already and I think they are pretty cool, I've also checked out the Picaxe programming Editor and it looks just as good as the BASIC Stamp. If I were buying these solely on price, Picaxe would win everytime, but this is where I want your opinion. Does the Picaxe chips have the same kind of abilities as a BASIC Stamp or are they pretty much the same performance wise?
 

Mycroft2152

Senior Member
It would help to know what you are planning to do wqith them. Otherwise, is just the same as a comparison of "Coke" and "Pepsi".

Of course cost is always an issue....
 

masterchief1517

New Member
Just random wiring things here and there, I think that STAMPS cost too much for my interest anyways so I'm gonna try out a PICAXE-08 and a PICKAXE-08M. I'm only trying the normal 8 pin because it comes with the starter kit, lol. *Placing order*
 
I've been a huge BS2 fan for going on 10 years now... I came across Picaxe about a year ago, and I am hooked!!!! these little buggers are great! They offer some features that the Stamp does not (like true background PMW)... the memory size and number of I/0 of the 08M is obviously much smaller than a BS2, but at the price for an 08M (compared to a BS2), you can use buy a lot of them and still be ahead!


 
 

masterchief1517

New Member
Yeah, my finger itching over that order button. I'm just not sure if I have a great use for them. I currently use BS2 in my robotics class (high school class, kinda weird because we are out in the middle of the "sticks", where even the biggest schools around us don't have this kind of class 80
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
The entry level PICAXE's have the same abilities as the BS1 except there are difference in the way analogue inputs are used and the I/O capabilities are slightly different. The more advanced PICAXE's offer a lot more, right up to the current top of the range 28X1 and 40X1 which are extremely competitively priced.

It's hard to compare PICAXE and Basic Stamp simply because there are so many variants of each and none are exact equivalents. I would venture that for many applications there would be a PICAXE or Basic Stamp which would be suitable for use ( and other alternatives as well ) although there are probably applications which one of the other are not suited to.

The nicest thing in my opinion about PICAXE's for anyone new to them is their low cost, simplicity of use ( no complex programming interface ) and free software. Very suited to 'try it and see' so I don't think you'll regret placing your order.
 

Wrenow

Senior Member
For what it is worth. I have a BS, that I bought several years ago, and it is still in the packaging somewhere. I have several Picaxes I bought in November, and many are in use in various projects. The 08M is a gem for a lot of stuff. If you are doing robotics, I highly recommend the 08M servo controller board.

Just my .02, of course. But as a newbie, I love the little buggers. For some other projects, I have, indeed, ordered the new 28x1 and 40x1 parts.

Good luck,

Wreno
 

ceke

New Member
I was a stamp fan until recently becoming acquainted with PICAXE and am hooked. Cost and flexibility of PICAXE has made me completely rethink my future robotic project. Rather than a couple expensive BS2's I am convinced a 08M Servo controller along with a handfull of 18X are a far better moduler robotic controller setup than BS's. Each has its advantages but I think BS's are dinasours compared to PICAXE.
M
 
Just for sheer ruggedness, fault tolerance and simplicity 08M's take a lot of beating. The multifunction I/O ability of the pins on 08M’s more than makes up for the number of legs to play with.

All you need is a battery and a chip for the heart of a simple project. Multi servo driving and some very clever serin decoding are features I like.

In class and on teacher courses I find they take a lot of abuse like polarity reversal, DIL socket 180 swaps and so forth. Stick with 3volt battery power and they don't get too hot or permanently melt down. Cool them off and they will run again. The new DisableBOD will allow down to 1.3 volt operation at close to 1uAmp.
 

demonicpicaxeguy

Senior Member
i use them for both commercial and fun
you generally get a hell of a lot more value dollar wise with the picaxe
if you bugger up a picaxe it's no great loss because they aren't that expensive
but if you bugger up a basic stamp it's a much bigger cost
not only that the picaxe is also much more reliable than the basic stamp

about the only thing the basic stamp has over the picaxe is processing speed but that won't be an issue in due course and it's not much of a difference anyway

the reliablility side of the picaxe is that you only have to worry about 1 chip going wrong where as on the basic stamp there are several and also a lot more points for form a short on to bugger it up
besides they are too costly
 

manuka

Senior Member
My down-under 2 cents worth. I first used Basic Stamps back in the mid '90s & spent many a happy year with them,even talking tertiary budgets into $$$$ BofEd BS2 class sets-& that was during US $ strong period too. Yikes = serious money!

I miss a few BS commands- DTMF & serial timeouts etc - but Picaxe inbuilts such as IR data Rx/Tx & DS18B20 more than cover this.

The last 5 years have been all Picaxe (as most Forum regulars know only too well),due to their ruggedness (yet to loose one!), ease of use, powerful commands, small footprint (which suits breadboards) &amp; of course <b>low cost </b> . I recall first stumbling on the 08 via a 2002 Google &amp; was quite convinced their quoted &#163;1 price was a misprint for &#163;10 in fact!

Conclusion hence for US educators-if you have no existing BS commitment then it's a total brainer to go Picaxe, especially given the recent surge in US interest the N&amp;V articles apparently have ignited. Naturally the ~12-15 year reign of Basic Stamps has lead to a LOT of associated curriculum material that may lock educators into a Parallax BS approach however...

Stan (NZ)
 

demonicpicaxeguy

Senior Member
the other important thing i want to put in along with my 2 cents is the support forum eg this it's amasing how quick a question can be answered on here
whereas i've haven't seen many basic stamp forums this friendly
 

kranenborg

Senior Member
Hello,

Important pros of the picaxe concept (and its creator):

1) New PICs introduced get very soon turned into new powerful PICAXE versions (rough statistics say about approx 8-9 months), so you get the new technology very fast. Furthermore I have the impression that all PIC functional modules are supported very well. The I2C implementation is the highest level implementation that I have come to see around on a microcontroller, hiding a lot of unnecessary details about the protocol.

2) The PICAXE allows a lot of experimenting &quot;under the hood&quot; by poking SFR registers (clock speed, I/O direction, internal pull-up use, timers etc.). I do not know to which extent the Stamps allow this.

3) I have the impression that you can actually have influence over the PICAXE spec. For example, I have the impression that a discussion on power use of a 08M in sleep mode (<A href='http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/forum/Topic.asp?topic_id=3484&amp;forum_id=19&amp;Topic_Title=Power%2BConsumption&amp;forum_title=No+new+posts+please%21+13 ' Target=_Blank>External Web Link</a> ) has resulted in actual implementation of my proposal to be able to completely disable the brown-out functionality (DISABLEBOD, but maybe I have a grotesque idea of my contribution here #(;o)

4) Low-power apps (microWatt range) are definitely possible (by using 2V or lower and slow 32KHz clocking), allowing a whole range of apps that are simply impossible with a stamp)

As said before, the price allows to investigate yourself without much risk

Regards, and welcome to the community

/Jurjen
http://www.kranenborg.org/ee/picaxe

Edited by - kranenborg on 11/05/2007 13:03:17
 

Marcwolf

Senior Member
Never actually having played around with the BS - I wqas drawn in from the pure PIC avenue. Having played around with a couple of BASIC compilers I found that many of them needed a lot of code to do simple things like servo control.
The PicAXE is great as it handles a lot of this house keeping for you.
I have introduces a few people to using PicAXE's and all of them have given positivce feedback.

Dave
 

Dippy

Moderator
I moved from Stamp2 to PICAXE. My first was an 18X. This did all what I wanted and at a fraction of cost of BS2.
No offense intended to Stamp as it was useful for learning, but nowadays I wouldn't even consider a BS1 or BS2 on a project.

And with the 28X1 in production many of the previous moans will disappear as it has similar behaviour as Stamp2's 'bigger' derivatives (except the bigger EEPROM version but I can't remember its number and even that one could behave annoyingly with power glitches).
 

premelec

Senior Member
I used BS 1 &amp; 2 and then found PICAXE which I've used ever since... inexpensive, simple download, great support, 08M has A/D convertors wonderful for small straight forward projects... not very fast but mostly that's fine for me... I've used bit banged interfacing with good results to D/A converters for multichannel voltage outputs - mostly 08M parts some 18X.
 

Brietech

Senior Member
The picaxes are great for just about anything so long as it doesn't require 1) a lot of speed or 2) complicated math (big numbers, floating point, etc.). I use picaxes for just about everything, but I was recently given a BasicX chip which i'm pretty excited about (they advertise something like 87,000 instructions/sec), just for the speed.
 

Dippy

Moderator
BasicX: Good Spec: Looks like serious competition for Parallax (assuming they can get into a cornered market, so it'll probably fizzle out next year).

But at 50USD that's a lot to pop.

Will it allow you to poke registers to change speed/power consumption? Can you access timers? On PICAXE you can.

What's the support (or Forum support) like for BasicX? Will someone helpful tell you to put resistors in series with your LEDs? Or will they tell you to push-off as they probably would in PIC forums?

Even on this forum you will find non-PICAXE questions being asked (and often answered!! tsk tsk) - because of the friendly support.

And you can get a lot of PICAXEs for 50USD, so its not really like-for-like .... and I'm sure there will be something faster tomorrow.

If speed is the sole issue then look elsewhere, but I'm not encouraging this thread to turn into a list of mines-bigger-than-yours.
 

demonicpicaxeguy

Senior Member
a little too late on the mine is bigger than yours thread transformation

actaully i might have somthing better than the basic stamp,the basicx

it's a simple compiler that uses a language of my own devising and it spits out the asm code for the pic ,currently it only does pic code asm as the moment but it will eventaully do 8051 and avr

but where the picaxe comes into it is that i'm doing a picaxe based pic/avr programmer
it's becomming a bit of a pain but i haven't been on it that long
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
I'll agree with Dippy that, &quot;Mine's bigger/better/faster than yours&quot;, doesn't really get us anywhere. All the competitors in the arena have something to offer and criteria for being &quot;best&quot;.

I spent a long time comparing options to choose a suitable controller for use in home projects before discovering the PICAXE which won hands down for me on grounds of component cost, simplicity of configuration and programming, minimal learning curve and simplest shipping option. My main subjective criteria was 'Value for Money'. With other requirements my choice would have been different ( and it was a close race ).

Because we're starting to mention other options, this is a list (E&amp;OE) of mainstream alternatives which the PICAXE can be compared with ...<code><pre><font size=2 face='Courier'>Arduino - ? - www.arduino.cc
ArmMite, ArmExpress - Coridium - www.armmodule.com
Athena, Dios, Zeus - Kronos Robotics - www.kronosrobotics.com
BASIC Stamp - Parallax Inc - www.parallax.com
BasicATOM - BasicMicro Inc - www.basicmicro.com
BasicX - NetMedia Inc - www.basicx.com
Brainstem - Acroname Robotics - www.acroname.com
C STAMP - A-WIT Technologies Inc - www.a-wit.com
CUBLOC, CuTOUCH - Comfile Technology Inc - www.comfiletech.com
OOpic - Savage Innovations - www.oopic.com
Propeller Chip - Parallax Inc - www.parallax.com
PICAXE - Revolution Education Ltd - www.picaxe.co.uk
TICkit - Protean Logic Inc - www.protean-logic.com
Tini - Maxim Semiconductor Inc - www.maxim-ic.com
ZX-24, ZX-40, ZX-44 - Elba Corp ? - www.zbasic.net </font></pre></code>
 

vk6bgn

New Member
A personal view from the average dude --..--

Many years ago I purchased a used BS1 system. BS1, programming lead and software. I only had it 2 days and shagged an I/O pin. $$$$ (silly me, my fault)

When the PICAXE 08-M's came out I purchased six of them. In that time I have only destroyed 1 of them. (my fault, see note below) A loss of only $4.00 Australian!!!
Not worth worrying about.

Note: Wasn't wearing my glasses. Somehow a 9 volt LM7809 voltage regulator looked like a 5 volt LM7805. Obvious outcome<img src="sad.gif" width=15 height=15 align=middle>

 
 
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