What is Femto Basic

Comments

• Mike Green Posts: 23,101

  2007-07-07 22:27 edited 2007-07-07 22:27

  FemtoBasic is a simple 32-bit integer Basic interpreter written mostly in Spin originally as a demonstration of concept by Tomas Rokicki, then improved and expanded by myself. It is intended to serve mostly as a stand-alone educational, testing, and development tool for the Propeller. It is expandable fairly simply and BoeBotBasic is one example of this which has additional statements for support of servo motors, a PING distance sensor, some IR distance sensors, and a digital compass. Both allow access to all the Propeller I/O pins and one set of two built-in counters that can be used for accurate pulse measurement or frequency synthesis. FemtoBasic uses a PS/2 keyboard and either a TV or VGA display for control while BoeBotBasic uses a serial port for this. Both provide for storage of programs and data on a PC-compatible SD card or in an attached EEPROM.
  
  For most applications, you should really be using Spin. It's faster, more complete as a programming language, and has many features including support for multiprocessing that nothing else currently has. There is expected to be a 3rd party C development system available around the end of this year, but details are still not available.
• satos Posts: 2

  2007-07-08 14:02 edited 2007-07-08 14:02

  Hello Mike
  
  Thank You for the answer
  So than i must learn SPIN..
  Do You know if it possible to make big projects with the Propeller chip?
  Exists big projects as reference with the propeller?
  It is possible to protect the code for comercial projects?
  
  Thanks again
  
  Best regards
  
  Satos
• Mike Green Posts: 23,101

  2007-07-08 14:45 edited 2007-07-08 14:45

  You would need to explain what you mean by "big projects". The Propeller's main memory is 32K which is used for both code and data by Spin. The Spin interpreter is very efficient in terms of code size and the interpreter itself is loaded from ROM and runs in the separate 2K cog memory for each cog that's using it. It's fairly easy to use overlays, loaded from EEPROM and drivers are available to use additional EEPROM space (above the minimal 32K bytes) for storing data and programs. For storage of highly variable data, you can use Ramtron's FRAM in place of flash EEPROM or you can devote some I/O pins to attach other types of mass storage including PC-compatible SD cards.
  
  There has been a lot of discussion previously on this forum of the code protection question. The simple answer is that the Propeller chip has no special hardware to support user code protection.