No user code is actually stored on the microcontroller. This code is read by a PBASIC interpreter on the PIC, dutifully following commands to blink a LED or display a character on an LCD. The code you write for the Basic Stamp is stored in 256 bytes of the EEPROM. The electronic design of the Basic Stamp is simple, yes, but there’s a method to the madness. Power is provided by a 9V battery connector soldered onto the board. beside that is a 4MHz resonator, a 5V linear regulator, and a transistor and a few resistors for the ‘brown out’ circuit. Other components include a 93LC56 serial EEPROM. We’re dealing with an old microcontroller when using the Basic Stamp Like the Arduino, it was encouraged to use the Basic Stamp in product design. Microchip’s smallest and newest chip is the PIC12LF1522, featuring twice as much Flash and ten times the amount of RAM. By modern standards, it’s tiny the closest modern analog would be the ATtiny10, itself not a very recent chip. The PIC16C56XL is the brains of the outfit, featuring 1.5kilobits of Flash memory and 25 bytes of RAM. In the official documentation, there are only a handful of parts: a microcontroller, an EEPROM with a few bytes of memory, a crystal, and a voltage regulator. The Basic Stamp is an extremely minimalist board that does just enough to blink an LED, read a button, or drive an LCD.
What do you get in the Basic Stamp starter kit? A single stamp, a programmer cable, and a surprising amount of documentation. Adjusted for inflation, this is nearly $230 in 2015 dollars. The Basic Stamp kit on my workbench was made in 1993, and sold for a suggested retail price of $139 USD. A Simple circuit with just a microcontroller, an EEPROM, crystal, and brownout circuit. Consider it a walk down memory lane, showing us how far the hobbyist electronics market has come in the past twenty year, and also an insight in how far we have left to go. This is the teardown and introduction to the first user friendly microcontroller development boards. I recently managed to get my hands on an original Basic Stamp kit. This title goes to the humble Basic Stamp, a four-component board that was introduced in the early 1990s. This might come as a surprise to some, but for others PICs and 68HC11s will remain as the first popular microcontrollers, found in everything from toys to microwave ovens.Īrduino can’t even claim its prominence as the first user-friendly microcontroller development board. Microcontrollers existed before the Arduino, and a device that anyone could program and blink an LED existed before the first Maker Faire.
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