BASIC Stamp

Although the BASIC Stamp 2 has the form of a 24 pin DIP chip, it is in fact a small printed circuit board (PCB) that contains the essential elements of a microprocessor system:[1] The end result is that a hobbyist can connect a 9 V battery to a BASIC Stamp and have a complete system.

Once a program has been written in the 'Stamp Editor', an integrated development environment (IDE) in Windows, the syntax can be checked, tokenized and sent to the chip through a serial/USB Mini-B cable, where it will run.

There are currently four variants of the interpreter: The BS2 sub-variants feature more memory, higher execution speed, additional specialized PBASIC commands, extra I/O pins, etc., in comparison to the original BS2 model.

A number of companies now make "clones" of the BASIC Stamp with additional features, such as faster execution, analog-to-digital converters and hardware-based PWM which can run in the background.

The Parallax Propeller is gradually accumulating software libraries which give it functionality similar to the BASIC Stamp; however, there is no uniform list of which PBASIC facilities now have Spin equivalents.