October 2006 Meeting Notes

09:45

Starbucks Coffee, Tea, Bagels, and Pastries

10:00

riscForth, reduced instruction set Forth - CH Ting
"I am trying to minimize the number of eP32 instructions. My goal is to reduce the machine instructions to 16 so that they can be encoded in 4-bit nibbles. Here is the current instruction list: CALL, RET, IF, ELSE, NEXT, @, !, DUP, DROP, OVER, >R, R>, AND, XOR, +, 2/. There is no room for NOP, but it can be synthesized with DUP DROP. I think a reasonable computer can be built with only these 16 instructions."

"My experiments now show that I need 17 instructions. I will let people vote to have their favorite instructions included."

11:30

Counting Zipcodes - Dave Jaffe
Dave will describe his completed Forth program that processes text files containing zipcodes and country names.

12:00

Lunch

13:00

Introductions, announcements, rumors, and random access

13:30

Forth Ramblings - Glen Haydon
An historical review.

14:30

Break

15:00

From Third Generation LEGO Mindstorms to ... Forth? - Glen Reuschling
Glen's presentation will begin with demonstrations of the three different incarnations of LEGO's robotics learning systems: LEGO-LOGO, LEGO Mindstorms, and LEGO Mindstorms NXT. It will be followed by a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the LEGO systems for classroom use. His talk will conclude with some ideas on how a language like Forth, combined with a LEGO-like robotics building system, could result in a much better learning experience.

16:00

Adjourn

Other Items:

• NASA Stereo Mission - uses a Forth processor
• Bitsaver's - documentation and software for minicomputers and mainframes, from the 50's to the 80's
• 'The Neddiad' - by Daniel Pinkwater - online novel
• Fedora Core
  Fedora Core 6 Innovates Unabated
• Ubuntu - a free complete Linux-based operating system
• Mitch Bradley may be supplying Open Firmware (Forth-based) for the $100 laptop project
• PICs with serial port for LCD, A/D, 4:1 mux, and USB

  PIC18F2550

  PIC18F4550

• TIERRA virtual machine - Submitted by Andy Korsak
• Arthur A. Collins: A Hero Among Hams
• LaFarr Stuart - Wikipedia - Homepage
• Richard E. Haskell - Design of Embedded Systems Using 68HC12/11 Microcontrollers

10/22/2006 - I just received a copy of a message that is being circulated in the German Forth Society. The excitement, as I understand, is about Bernd Paysan's GForth being ported to the R8C micro-controller and described in the current special issue of the magazine Elektor which is published in several languages.

Apparently, the story containing Forth starts on page 52 of the 114-page special issue ("Sonderheft" in German). The "Elektor" magazine has been in circulation for quite a while, and seems to be pretty impressive and popular. If you have encountered an English-language version of it, then I need not say any more. The Germans appear to be quite excited about their GForth presentation in a trade magazine.

Henry Vinerts

Links:

R8C/13 features

German article

R8C Forth

Below is a discussion of the FreeImage graphics library and Mike Ghan's sample code for linking to it from SwiftForth. If you're interested in calling Windows DLLs or in doing graphics this will be huge for you. It's also a good motivator for getting started with SwiftForth.

A simple testbed for FreeImage.

Kevin Appert