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PROPELLER HEADS WANTED

Already out of room and I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s almost easier to define Propeller by what it isn’t rather than by what it is.

What it isn’t is the Holy Grail solution to the ages-old parallel problem (i.e., machines think in parallel, people don’t). It has nothing to do with “automagically” parallelizing conventional software.

What it isn’t is eight BASIC Stamps on a chip. Over time, enhanced tools and libraries will no doubt make Propeller more accessible. Nevertheless, it’s nothing like a BASIC Stamp, nor is it intended to be.

As you might have gathered, it isn’t a handholding solution for beginners. Propeller will not baby you. Tough love is more like it. There are a truly impressive number of ways to crash, and badly. Imagine different programs trying to use the same I/O pins or even messing around with the clock. You can do all of this and more—live free or die, as they say. Propeller comes with a huge length of rope, enough to do great things—and enough to tie yourself up in really tight knots.

So, what is Propeller? I guess what matters most, even more than the bits and bytes, is that it’s the product of a unified vision. There’s a purity of purpose from the loftiest heights of the IDE to the lithographic level of the transistors. And it’s a vision not hamstrung by existing convention

As such, Propeller can deliver impressive results. I’ve been playing with the Propeller demonstration board, which, with little more than the chip itself, can handle mouse, keyboard, audio, and video, the latter including VGA, NTSC, and, with the right crystal, even broadcast (see Figure 3)!

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Figure 3—The Propeller demonstration board demonstrates that you don’t need a lot of silicon to get a lot of work (mouse, keyboard, audio, and video) done. The resistor-ladder DACs at the bottom support VGA and broadcast (!) video.

For even more fun, check out the Hydra designed by Andre LaMothe (see Photo 4). It crams the equivalent of a circa ’80s video game into Propeller, demonstrating just how far a little silicon can go in the hands of an expert. Also, supplementing the formal Propeller documentation, LaMothe’s new Hydra book, Game Programming for the Propeller Powered Hydra, presents a lot of Propeller and Spin information in an accessible way.

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Photo 4—Pac Man lives. Andre LaMothe takes advantage of the Propeller’s unique capabilities to cram an entire video game platform into his Hydra board.

One other thing Propeller for sure isn’t: boring. When it comes to multicore, Propeller is proof that the fun has just begun.