@BigFoot - Thanks for sharing. It is nice to see some real world applications in the marketplace, and you guys have your very own little niche. Very cool indeed.
I personally prefer adding another Propeller chip and using serial communication between them. Bruce
For two props it's an excellent solution. I would point out that as the number of Propeller chips increase beyond two, it may benefit substantially to develop parallel communications.
If you can't wait for the Prop II, and you can use forth, you can add props and the application thinks there are more cores and more pins, and additional chunks of hub and cog memory.
PropForth v4.5/4.6(next week or so) demo these function (see the regression tests). Also, forth scripts execute from storage (SD/EEPROM) so large programs may be executed without increasing dictionary size. As long as you can keep individual functins within the 32k limit, you can have as many as you want, so memory is less of an issue. This release is enough to get demo the functionality, but is being optimize next release.
In Autum (August/September?) the final-ish version of the kernel v5.0 will be released, and these functions will be optimized. The pages assembler will allow an unlimited (or at least very large) amount of optimized functions with no impact on memory footprint. Most bottles necks have been optimized in assembler so the entire forth kernel appears to execute at nearly assembler speed.
Of course, its forth, and some would say that's cheating.
Where does on learn embedded Forth? I don't know that I would ever use it very much, but curiosity about programming languages has me wanting to experiment.
This will pretty much get you started. It's standard/Classic FORTH. Each implementation is a bit different. PropFORTH has things that were never even thought of back then and the Prop has some unique aspects, obviously. The multi-COG words are unique of course. The multi-Prop support is a lot of fun to wrap your head around. The PropFORTH wiki (http://code.google.com/p/propforth/ ) has a growing collection of documentation but is certainly a 'work in progress'. Like anything else, try it and ask questions!!
Grab your favorite Prop board (or two), load up PropFORTH and start playing!!
Comments
Bruce
If you can't wait for the Prop II, and you can use forth, you can add props and the application thinks there are more cores and more pins, and additional chunks of hub and cog memory.
PropForth v4.5/4.6(next week or so) demo these function (see the regression tests). Also, forth scripts execute from storage (SD/EEPROM) so large programs may be executed without increasing dictionary size. As long as you can keep individual functins within the 32k limit, you can have as many as you want, so memory is less of an issue. This release is enough to get demo the functionality, but is being optimize next release.
In Autum (August/September?) the final-ish version of the kernel v5.0 will be released, and these functions will be optimized. The pages assembler will allow an unlimited (or at least very large) amount of optimized functions with no impact on memory footprint. Most bottles necks have been optimized in assembler so the entire forth kernel appears to execute at nearly assembler speed.
Of course, its forth, and some would say that's cheating.
-Phil
This will pretty much get you started. It's standard/Classic FORTH. Each implementation is a bit different. PropFORTH has things that were never even thought of back then and the Prop has some unique aspects, obviously. The multi-COG words are unique of course. The multi-Prop support is a lot of fun to wrap your head around. The PropFORTH wiki (http://code.google.com/p/propforth/ ) has a growing collection of documentation but is certainly a 'work in progress'. Like anything else, try it and ask questions!!
Grab your favorite Prop board (or two), load up PropFORTH and start playing!!
It doesn't bite!!
Check out this thread I started and add a PASM contribution.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?132995-Empty-Loop-Benchmarks