January 2009 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

10:00

Coffee and a Chat

10:15

eForth in C - CH Ting
"Since I got the uVision 3 microcontroller development system which comes with a good C compiler for many many microcontrollers, I thought that it would be a good idea to write eForth in C, just for portability. I revisited Wil Baden's thisForth and couldn't even understand it. There's got to be a simpler way to do it. I think I can get an interpreter to run this week. The compiler would be much more difficult. I will need help in building the Forth dictionary as a data structure."

11:40

Lunch
Early lunch on-campus to avoid the rush

13:00

Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, Random Access

13:20

Interesting Items - Volume 12 - Dave Jaffe
Dave will continue his survey of interesting newly-introduced microcontrollers, I/O peripherals, sensors, products, and gadgets that can provide useful and unique capabilities to Forth embedded systems. If anyone has come across anything that fits this category, pass them along to him for inclusion in his presentation.

Slides - pdf file

14:00

Semi-Parallel Multiplier with Log2 N Steps - John E. Harbold
"I figured out a 'semi-parallel' multiplier when I was in the Hilton Sports Book in Las Vegas that would be an adjunct design for Ting's massively parallel matrix multiplier."

Slides - pdf file

15:00

Sneak Preview: Music Synthesizer (MusicBox24) on FORTHdrive - Masa Kasahara
Now that the demo program (MusicBox24) is available from IntellaSys, you can experiment with it yourself. Masa has been waiting for it ever since Michael Montvelishky showed it off on Forth Day in 2007. It is not an easy program to understand, but he started working on it. Although he does not know what will be presented in the near future, he will demonstrate how to install VentureForth and run a couple of demo programs, just enough to start your own journey with this marvelous device.

15:30

Adjourn

15:30

Indoctrinate U DVD - Kevin Appert
It's a little off-topic, but important! Note that this version of Indoctrinate U contains explicit language. There will be no Forth discussed afterwards, so if you're not interested, you're free to leave. Run time is 89 minutes.

"Speech codes. Censorship. Enforced political conformity. Hostility to diversity of opinion. Sensitivity training. We usually associate such things totalitarian regimes, not with the American universities that nurtured the free speech movement."

Documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney investigates political censorship at colleges and universities in the US.

Other items:

Forth

A Forth HTML Generator

Forth in C

pForth - Portable Forth in C

MinForth - Minimalistic Forth in C

FICL - Forth Inspired Command Language

Other

OpenGrok

Cythbot - Instrumented guitar

Ping - Ultrasonic range finder from Parallax

Bitscope - used PC as display

USBee DX - Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, Logic Analyzer and Bus Analyzer

Hobbylab.us - PC USB oscilloscope

Stellasis - Serial to Ethernet convertor

Gainspan - Wifi networks