Good thread. Yes I am very aware of the parallax propeller. As you both say kind of a crazy chip. I have used another product the SXB micros. They run Basic at 80 Mhz and are so cheap that If I have more than a few chips I just switch over. Unfortunately they are obsolete in the dip form. When I looked at the propeller my take away was that it was such an odd chip I actually did not want to deal with it figuring its life was just a few years. Its advantage was the ability to have so many things running in parallel.
The great thing about the PICs are there are such a wide diversity of them at really cheap prices. Tom thanks for the insight on the synchronous clock. Did not realize that. Regards Paul WB8TSL On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Tom Van Baak <t...@leapsecond.com> wrote: > > Has anyone else looked at the Parallax Propeller processor for timing > > functions? > > Hi Brian, > > Oh yes. Really nice chip. But for precise timing applications I had huge > problems with phase and temperature stability of its internal PLL. I tried > half a dozen different boards purchased over several years. Tech support > was not interested in someone who worried about nanoseconds. > > The architecture is really interesting, but it is such an odd chip, with > almost zero market visibility these days, that I set aside the goal of > using it as the basis of a general purpose 8-channel 6 ns precision > counter. You can find various timer and counter examples at > obex.parallax.com. If you make progress on the project, please let me > know, ok? > > By contrast, the PIC chips I use are fully synchronous so when you use 10 > MHz atomic references the clock/output jitter and phase stability is almost > below what I can measure here. Maybe under 2 ps. So that's why I use PIC's > as the basis of all my picDIV and picPET projects. But I'm open to using > something different in the future. > > /tvb > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to > https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.