OK FORTH aficionados, here's a homebrew computer.
Martin_H
Posts: 4,051
A year or so ago one someone posted that they bought a FIGnition. Apparently that was to straight forward for this person who decided to home brew one.
https://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition/documentation/build-it-rev-d/fignition-flint
https://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition/documentation/build-it-rev-d/fignition-flint
Comments
i should ask Chip to sign my Propeller Demo Board... and whatever board the Propeller II first comes out on.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/24/apple-i-christies-auction/
The truth is that Forth on the Propeller is far better preforming that Forth on a Propeller is quite adequate and likely faster than that.
I like well done hand wiring jobs. Most of my strip board efforts don't look nearly as nice.
Could this be the post you were thinking of?
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/132696-1.5KB-Wear-levelling-FLASH-filesystem-driver...
Yes you can do Forth on a Raspberry Pi that is faster and larger, but the GPIO is a huge bottleneck. Or you can use an AVR chip, if you can muddle through the tool chain.
But that is about all. Going back to 8 bit on a Z80 or some other CPU may have 'retro cool', but is very lacking in size and performance.
AND if you have Forth on the Propeller mimic the PBasic PIN configuraion scheme for i/o (HIGH, LOW, INPUT, OUTPUT), I suspect a lot of BasicStamp2 users that originally were intimidated by Spin would happily adopt a Forth on Propeller.
Doing i/o in Spin really clobbered the BS2. Thus Arduino seemed so easy. Arduino also exploited that fact that most DIY are thinking about Wiring, not binary i/o codes and BigEndian versus LittleEndian.
PBasic is not only rapid deployment, it is easy and fun deployment. While Spin to the rank beginner seems mental... even if it has good roots in Pascal.
Strip board - like I said I like strip board.
Self hosting - from the videos it looks completely awkward to use, but it's still pretty cool.
I have no doubt someone could build a Propeller based Forth with either composite or VGA out, and real keyboard input. There's the Pocket Mini Computer from Propeller Powered that does roughly the same thing with BASIC. But it has to be on strip board running FORTH to pull me away from the FLINT.
Done.
In the Extensions directory, please find vga.f. This implements the JupiterAce on the prop, two cogs displayed as two separate terminal sessions on the same screen. CTL^T to switch between cogs. Runs on a stock Prop Demo board.
Add the SD from SD card adapter. Load the SD kernel, and you have a Jupiter ACE with 4 Gig of storage.
http://code.google.com/p/propforth/wiki/SDsetupREVISITED
Please built the Prop, eeprom, power and VGA circuit on stripboard. I used breadboard, but I didn't have the right regulator and eeprom so I never finished.
Earlier this year I bought a couple of GA144 chips and Schmartzboards to see how to deploy. Even those, which are designed by Mr. Chas. Moore himself, make less sense to me that parallel Forth on the Propeller.
I think PropForth V3.5 already did the video and keyboard route. But it ate up a lot of Cogs that one might want for other things in an eventually headless application.. so V5.0 went to the Serial Console approach.
Tachyon Forth and pfth have followed that Serial Console approach for the most part.
And I have even build a Dumb ANSI terminal that uses a decidated Propeller that can be applied to the Serial Console approach if you really do not require a computer workstation. But there is a lot of handiness in keeping code in .txt files and using Cut and Paste to install it for testing and deployment.
The Forth of the Propeller makes a really wonderful remote microcontroller with relays, senors, and motor attached. Once can study what they really want to develop while sitting at the other end of a very long wire.
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Still I appreciate the history this has with it and I do like strip boards... they are just impossible to buy in Taiwan and I have the Propeller Project Boards that are ever so easy to deploy.
These days, I have a sandwitch box with the Propeller Project Board, a power supply and a USB2Serial interface and I can sit down anywhere and develop with my notebook.
32 bits is nice because of the 32bits of i/o that can be exploited quick and easy.
Hey that's pretty neat.
IF you give it a try, there is something even neater. You can have more than 8 cogs with MCS. This is actually cheating, because you need a second EEprom, so you need quickstart or protoboard, normally we just add bare prop chip(s). In this case, you only want VGA on the demo board, and boot with MCS channels on the second (first submaster) board. But if you set up the non VGA to boot with MCS running on a couple of pins...
You can have a second prop board (protoboard) boot , and launch into MCS, and look for slave prop (on pins 26 and 27 for example). The master emulates EEprom for the slave. You can add as many sub props as you want, as long as there is a another slave hanging off 26 & 27, the current sub master will try to boot it and emulate EEprom. You can even increment the prop number for each submaster. Then you conio to the whatever cog you want in the array.
I have a whole pile of bare prop chips for this, but I STILL haven't gotten around to doing it. I can hardly fill up 8 cogs. But its nice to know I COULD have 50 cogs when I need them, if I got off my butt.