Basic Stamp Programming on Mac

With a pause between school "semesters," I've been neck deep in several projects. One of the smaller ones was assembling a Basic Stamp 2 prototype board that came with the book, 123 Robotics Experiments for the Evil Genius (TAB Robotics). This board features a spot for a solderless breadboard making prototyping 10x easier than the Parallax BS2 board I'd been using (let's just say that wire wrapping sucks).

In a never-ending quest to unshackle myself from Winderz, a Google search followed by a quick experiment revealed that one can program BS2 using my favorite operating system. How? Easy.

1. MacBS2: This is the IDE. Not fancy but who cares? Download it here.
2. Keyspan Serial Adapter or equivalent (e.g., Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter ( USA-19HS ) from Amazon -- check to make sure this will work on the MacBS2 website).

After downloading MacBS2 read and follow the install instructions. You'll copy the application to the Applications folder. Using an administrator account, launch the application and when prompted, click to download & install the tokenizer library.

Install your Keyspan (or whatever) software, and plug it into the computer & proto board. Write a program. Click run. Et voilà! Enjoy the magic of BS2 on Mac OS X. :)


(To those who celebrate it with me, Happy Easter! Otherwise I wish you a Happy Sunday :))