The IsoPod Cometh

Posted 6 Jun 2002 at 20:49 UTC by steve

New Micros has announced a new, low-cost embedded controller board called the IsoPod. The new board is based on a Motorola DSP56F800 series processor. Compared to a Basic Stamp's 4000 instructions/sec, the IsoPod runs at 200,000 instructions/sec. The board provides a wide range of I/O including 12bit ADC (8 ch), RS232, RS422, SPI, CAN 2.0 A/B bus, 12ch Servo PWM outputs, Quadrature decoder inputs, motor controllers, and some general purpose timers. The system also supports concurrent programming using the IsoMAX programming language. All this is on a board that's just 1.2" x 3.3" and costs $99! I expect to see a lot of robots using this board in the near future.

Groovy., posted 7 Jun 2002 at 17:17 UTC by NateW » (Master)

Thanks for the link, that looks very cool.

I have an IsoPOD, posted 8 Jun 2002 at 12:10 UTC by blueeyedpop » (Master)

I have one of these things, and it's really changing the way I think about programming. NMI's FORTH based products, are really cool, because the language resides on the chip( It is also an operating system). IsoMAX is no exception. You build state machines, and set them off to play in the background while I continue to work.

See my notes in the future for progress reports.

additional info, posted 16 Jul 2002 at 22:40 UTC by blueeyedpop » (Master)

Actually, in addition to the 12 pwm for servos or other motor pwm functions, the 4 quad timer registers can be configured as r/c servo pwm, at the cost of other functions, like timers and Quadrature input. This would give 22 r/c servos.