February 2012 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

09:45

Coffee and a Chat

10:00

Planning for SVFIG MakerFaire Participation - Masa Kasahara
Willing particpants for the May 19th and 20th event in San Mateo include:

Participant	Application to show:
Dennis A. Ruffer	GA144 Forth applications
Brad Nelson	?
CH Ting	Forth on an Arduino
Carl Hansen	?

10:30

Reports on the Taiwan FIG Conference and Brevia2 FPGA - CH Ting

One Page Forth in JavaScript

"One very interesting topic presented in Taiwan FIG Conference was 'One Page Forth in Javascript'. The authors compressed an entire Forth Virtual Machine, including an interpreter and a compiler, into 58 text lines on one page."

JEForth (in Chinese)

Slides

eP32 on Brevia2 FPGA Kit: "I could not get the FTDI drivers to install on my Windows XP computer. My wife loaned me her Windows 7 computer, on which the drivers installed properly. The eP32 project was imported for ispLEVEL IDE to the newer Diamond IDE. eP32 and was successfully synthesized and programmed to Brevia2 Kit. eForth then booted up correctly."

11:45

Lunch
We ate at the Treehouse.

13:00

Introductions, announcements, rumours, and gossip - All assembled
Each attendee introduced themself and recalled the first Forth meeting attended.

13:05

Digital I/O on Green Arrays' GA144 implemented in polyFORTH - Peter Milford
Peter discussed implementing an SPI interfaced accelerometer on a GA144 evaluation board using Green Arrays' native polyFORTH.

Slides - 895 Kb pdf file

GA144 Evaluation Board - Reference Manual

CMA3000 accelerometer data sheet

CMA3000 accelerometer Product Family Specificiation

13:25

Literate Programming - Dennis A. Ruffer
"Literate Programming - Testable documentation --- My ongoing saga of using Noweb in LyX."

Slides & software - 97 Kb zip file

Template - 18.5 Kb pdf file

Slides - 75.7 Kb pdf file

Noweb - A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming

LyX - The Document Processor

14:15

Break

14:20

Literate Programming using the Forth Parser - Brad Nelson
Brad presented a small system for literate programming implemented in Forth. Using Forth's innate parsing flexibility, a literate programming facility targeting ebook readers can be added with minimal use of external tools.

Slides & software - 115 Kb zip file

15:00

Reenginering an RPN calculator - Eric Smith
"HP discontinued the HP-41C family of programmable scientific RPN calculators in 1991. While HP still makes high-end graphing scientific calculators using a stack-based language called RPL, some users still prefer the relative simplicity of RPN. Richard Ottosen and I have undertaken to develop an HP-41CX compatible calculator using state-of-the-art components. I will discuss the design and demonstrate the current state of development."

Eric's website

Hewlett-Packard Calculators

i41CX+ - Programmable & Expandable RPN Scientific Calculator

Calculator Implementations Available for the iPhone and iPod Touch

Sharp Memory LCD