SVFIG
Saturday, May 22nd

SVFIG will meet at Stanford in Building 550 (aka Peterson Building). Its relationship to Terman Engineering Center (the former meeting place) can be found on these maps - Slide1 or Slide2.

There is open parking on weekends. Park in any A or C or metered space.

Enter the building from Panama Mall. The door is labeled "Building 550 - Mechanical Engineering Design Group". Walk up the stairs just inside the doorway. Room 200 is on the left at the top of the stairs. (In the event that the building door is locked, there will either be someone on duty to let you in or a cellphone number to call. Do not ask Stanford students to let you in and do not enter the building behind students.)

Temporary wireless Internet access at the meeting can be arranged by sending an email request to Dave Jaffe (dljaffe -at- stanford.edu).

If you would like to have meeting announcements e-mailed to you, send the message Subscribe SVFIG Meeting Agenda to: George Perry

Meeting Agenda for May

SVFIG will attend the Maker Faire on Saturday, May 22nd

How you can help SVFIG:

Bring your speaker and topic suggestions to every meeting!
Your input for and participation in next year's Forth Day is always welcomed.

Coming to SVFIG in June:

Digital Chart of the World - CH Ting
"I got this Digital Chart of the World on the USGS website, code name GTOPO30. It is a huge data set (1.7 Gb) covering the entire earth with 30 arc-second resolution. I am trying to plot maps from this data set. I like to display the globe, rotate the globe to any angle, and expand an area to the limit of the data set, similar to the way I played with the Mandelbrot set."

View of a Faire - Dave Jaffe
Dave will share his photos from the Maker Faire.

Oscillator in Forth - Bob Nash
Bob will describe the direct digital synthesizer (DDS) signal generator (with display) he built using Charley Shattuck's MyForth. An interesting challenge was doing quad multiplication on an 8-bit machine using a modified Russian Peasant algorithm. This was needed to calculate the number for the frequency display (no hardware was needed to measure the frequency).

Coming to SVFIG:

Task Interface in Forth for eCOS - Part 2 - John E. Harbold
"I'll present the object-oriented interface to the task interface in Forth for eCOS. This will describe the way to create and manage tasks in Forth."

Engineering TV
Fifty engineering topic channels, four new episodes per week.

Botbash 2000 Video
A cheapie video of a May 2000 robot rumble in Mesa, AZ.

WAV File and Soundcard I/O Software Using Win32Forth - Andy Korsak
This software was written for amateur radio applications. Andy has suggested that it might be useful to look at his code in advance of his talk. Contributions to this work-in-progress would be welcomed. You can download and view his sound card software on the Win32Forth group (membership required), or here.

Solicitations for presentations and assistance:

Mitch Bradley's Forth in C
A volunteer is needed to present and demonstrate this software.

PowerMops Forth for the Mac - Kevin Appert
Kevin Appert: "Mops is an open-source, full-featured, object-oriented stand-alone programming language for Mac OS X descended from the much-beloved NEON. I now have a working installation and when I know enough to do a good demo, I’ll be doing a talk. I’d be grateful for any help and advice from anyone familiar with PowerMOPS.”

PowerMops on SourceForge

Carbon Mac Forth - Kevin Appert
Kevin Appert: "Mac Forth was the first programming language used on the bench to bring up the Mac and the first programming language with Mac API available to the public. I have substantial interest in the current version, Carbon Mac Forth and I’m hoping to do what I can to promote it. I'm unable to contact Ward McFarland, the Carbon MacForth guy. If anybody knows a good way to buy a copy, please fill me in! His email appears full and he doesn't reply. The phone number is out of service, but the website is still up. I’m hoping that if Carbon Mac Forth is now an orphan, we can make all the source and executable available on our website.

Please indicate your interest for these topics:

Viewing of Analog by Design shows hosted by Bob Pease - list of shows
Review and discussion of recent postings on news:comp.lang.forth
Review and discussion of interesting Forth projects and many files at the Yahoo Win32Forth Group

If you have anything you'd like to talk about this month,
please contact Kevin Appert.