Quick Question

[TomMystery]

I have been working with the basic atom for some time, however it is alot more expensive then these comperative pixaxes. These little devices seem to be quite nifty except for the slow baud speed and eeprom. I was wondering if the device has any problems with refering to an external IC2 EEPROM for loop commands. This way I can store the main program on the picaxe, but store repetative loop coding on an external IC2. Has anyone tried this? And what were the results?

 

[hippy]

The PICAXE can only execute programs stored internally, but it could read 'commands' from external EEPROM and then branch to routines which would handle those commands. The downside is that routines to handle EEPROM-stored commands need to be written, and the execution of the commands will be relatively slow; PICAXE firmware interpreter executing your own interpreter.

 

[TomMystery]

Hmm... my other idea is to use a couple of picaxes to activate eachother for program loops. So that I would have one picaxe driving a part of the program and then another picaxe exectuting another part of the program. 600 lines of code is just very limited... Has anyone tried working a more complex program that way?

 

[BeanieBots]

It is certainly possible to break the code down into chunks and have a seperate PICAXE run each chunk. I often do this when there are many sensors which require pre-processing before entering the 'main' PICAXE. It would really depend on your exact requirements and how well/easy it would be to break it down into independant chunks. The other issue is passing data between PICAXES and keeping things syncronised. Serial comms is an obvious solution but whenever possible I prefer to pass single variables via a mechanism that cannot latch-up when there is no data. This can be done with PWMout - readADC/pulsin, pulsout - pulsin or even servo - pulsin.

 

[TomMystery]

So I can basically write various parts of the code into lets say three different picaxe's and they can trigger eachother with pulseout without choking up? That could work for my design....

 

[TomMystery]

Another quick question, I understand that the picaxe can also be overclocked up to 16MHZ with an external resonator. Is it possible to use serial out at that clock speed? And what baud rate would it give me using the 24x?