May 2006 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert


10:00

Starbucks Coffee, Tea, Bagels, and Pastries

10:15

Revisiting Game of Life - CH Ting
"A while ago, I saw a very nice game of Life display in one of my favorite electronics shops, Anchor Electronics, at 2040 Walsh Ave in Santa Clara. It is a 16x16 LED panel, showing many sequences of the game of Life from different starting patterns. I was surprised at how well the display runs with only a 16x16 display. I will try to recreate it and show it in the meeting. I hope members will bring their own implementations to the meeting to share."

Anchor Electronics
Game of Life Overview
John Conway's Game of Life
Life in Forth - Listing was published in September 1980 Byte Magazine

12:00

Lunch - go to TOGO's or bring your own food and stay at Cogswell

13:10

What Happened at the Maker Faire? - Dave Jaffe
Dave will review, through photographs, the many activities, exhibits, products, and demonstrations that occurred at this extraordinary event. SVFIG may want to consider participating there next year.

Maker Faire
Zap Xebra electric vehicle

15:30

IntellaSys Presentations - Jeff Fox, Doug Dillon, and John Rible
"Jeff, Doug, and John will VentureForth(tm) over the SEA(tm) of processors that the folks at IntellaSys have been creating over the last few years. The talks will present an insider's view of the hardware and software, giving an introduction to the systems and applications due out later this year."

"A" chips will run at 1 Ghz, has 24 processors, has 64 Kb of ROM and 64K of RAM, haas 80 pins, less than 10 mm by 10 mm die size, implement SPI in software, have A/D and D/A, external memory interface, boot from RA, ROM, or SPI. The "B" chip will have 40 processors, 100 pins, and more I/O.

One application discussed is a wireless home theatre system with a speaker tuning network designed to compensate for the speaker and listener position in the room.

The Altera FPGA (2S60) implementation runs at 100 Mhz.

ColorForth is 12K, consists of a 1 Kb kernel, and will be made public.

Other items discussed:

8051 variants:
Philips
Keil - List of devices available from Philips
Free example programs
FindChips.com searches distributor inventory for all types of electronics, including passives, connectors, optoelectronics, and more
Surface mount hot air gun
Nuts and Volts Magazine - Advertisers
Lemos International - wireless products
HP-75 Forth
Soduku article in Scientific American

From Kevin Appert and George Perry:

San Francisco Peregrine Falcon Nest Cam
RocketBoom - Video Blog on Technology, Art, Stuff
Google Video Search
Robot Mule
Berkeley Public Library Tool Lending Library
Limit Eminent Domain
Bill Hicks - stand-up comedian, satirist, and social critic
Amazon
Wikipedia listing

Meeting Announcement

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