A review of the original OOPic.


I recently sold one of my Basic Stamp 2s and its carrier board. During this time I had also been hearing a lot about Savage Innovation’s OOPic so, I decided I’d spend my new found $45 dollars and buy one. The OOPic starters package contains one OOPic chip and board, one programming cable, and one 9v battery clip that fits the OOPic board. All this for $49 dollars? Yup, pretty good deal, if I do say so myself. To top it all off, Savage offers a 15% educational discount. Since I’m still a student, and I am going to be doing educational things (like building robots) with it, I applied for the educational discount. Savage doesn’t sell the boards directly, so I had to order it from Acroname Inc. I opted out of purchasing a CD ROM with the software and manual, since it is a free download off the OOPic website. A few days later my new OOPic arrived in perfect order. Unfortunately that was a busy week and I didn’t have a chance to use it till later. Before going on I’ll give you some info on the OOPic.

Tech Specs:

2 inches X 3-1/2 inches in size
Programmable in Visual Basic (without visual), C, and Java syntax.
Object Oriented
Multitasking
4096 instruction capacity ( up to 32768 instruction with optional EEPROM)
Up to 82 objects and variables
2000 Basic instruction per second.
100,000 Virtual Circuit operations per second.
31 I/O lines with 2 lines for IC2 network
25ma source/sink current per pin
Programmable from the parallel port
Networkable


Using The OOPic:

At this time the OOPic has a few interesting quirks that should be noted. First off, the compiler was written to be in two parts. The GUI and the actual compiler. This was written this was so that you could compile your programs without having to use the GUI. The drawback to this design is that the compiler will only compile saved programs and NOT the currently displayed program. I.E. You have to save your program for the latest version to compile. This has lead to many a newbies confusion, including mine, in fact, I was about ready to send mine back. Serial communication also has a few strange things. You might want to do a search on the OOPic e-mail forum, at www.egroups.com/group/oopic for things such as "serial" and "problems." I believe someone mentioned something about having an inverter on it, but I’m not sure.



To get started programming all you have to do is plug in your programming cable into your computers parallel port and then plug the other end into the OOPic’s programming receptacle. Because the OOPic uses ELECTRONICALLY erase able ROM you will also need to have power supplied to it also. The starter kit comes with a nifty battery clip that plugs into a 9V battery on one end and the power pins on the other. One thing to note though. The OOPic’s 6- 15V battery power is not necessarily meant to run your motors, and other electronic equipment. A standard servo will suck a 9V battery dry in a short amount of time. Also most motors will overdraw the power supplies current and cause the OOPic to reset. Therefore, use a separate power source.

The OOPic has a 40pin header to allow you access to all of its 31 I/O pins and power. This header also fits nicely into a IDE cable. Another thing to note is that the header pin number don’t correspond to the I/O line numbers. I.E. I/O line 31 ISN’T header pin 31. I/O pin 31 is really header pin 26. More info on the pin outs can be found at http://www.oopic.com/con40.htm.

To begin programming your OOPic, you will need to download the latest software off the website. The web page is a bit hard to navigate, so you can just click here. Spend some time playing around with the examples. You can learn a lot. Check out this page to see just how easy it is to program the OOPic. I’d also highly recommend reading the programming manual as it contains a wealth of information.

Conclusion:

Overall, the OOPic is a great chip. You really can’t beat it’s huge list of features for a dirt cheap $50 price tag. About the only things I consider as drawback are the 4 ADC lines, 8 would be much better, some quirky things about the IDE, which Scott is fixing, and its relative newness, and therefore lack of support. Most can be easily lived with. The compiler is going to be fixed soon, and GoRobotics.net has started a rapidly growing e-mail loop for OOPic user at www.egroups.com/group/oopic. That only leaves the ADC lines. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. The bottom line is, if you don’t have a OOPic, your missing out. GoRobotics.net gives it two thumbs up! Stay tuned for upcoming articles on all the OOPic’s different objects and how to use them.