At 08:40 PM 9/29/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Ive noticed on a lot of these groups people always asking about basic stamps
>and pic based controllers in general, I am great at programming in vb, but
>when it comes to assembly im lost.  I understand basic commands that are in
>the PIC, mid range, instruction set.  But what i was thinking of is
>desinging a basic stamp clone, (lets face it there are only $10 in parts on
>the board, and a programmer did the "real work"!), I can handle most of
>everything i want except for one...retriving the user code out of an
>external eeprom.

This is relatively simple : just use the built in I2C stuff on the PIC's.

Basically, the way I envision the Stamp interpreter is as a giant jump
table with some RAM
locations keeping track of interpreter state.  An opcode is pulled out of
the eeprom which causes a jump to
the proper assembly code with the parameter setup based on the opcode.
There are, I believe a couple of microchip appnotes on talking to various
EEPROMS.  Search throught their knowledge base and you should be set.

-Erik Reikes