June 2011 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

09:50

Coffee and a Chat

10:15

Traffic Lights on Arduino - CH Ting
Ting has improved his Traffic Light Controller program and ported it to the Arduino Uno.

Tao of Arduino - 185 Kb pdf file

Code - 2Kb txt file

Ardweeny- Arduino Backpack Kit

11:00

More Quantum Computing - Jack Woehr (via Skype)
"A Unified Field Hypothesis suggests that the geometry of an infinitely subconsituent universe is sufficient to unify the four forces and reconcile paradoxes encountered observing both the subatomic and the macroscopic."

The Universe is Made of Lint - 3.80 Mb pdf file

Stan Rogers - White Collar Holler

11:45

Lunch
We will walk to The Treehouse by Tresidder Union.

13:00

Introductions, announcements, rumours and gossip - All assembled
Everyone introduced themselves and briefly mentioned something about their Forth experiences.

13:30

View of a Faire - Dave Jaffe
Dave shared the photos he took at the Maker Faire.

Photos - 1.12 Mb pdf file

14:00

This talk was cancelled due to illness. Hopefully Tim (or whoever was ill) will have a speedy recovery and he'll be able to present his talk in July.

FedEx's Other Forth System - Tim Lee
Many may be aware that the FedEx tracking wand runs on an application written in SwiftX Forth from FORTH, Inc.

FedEx has a history of employing Forth applications. In the 1990s, at FedEx's operations center in Memphis, another Forth-based system assigned all their air crews and tracked schedule changes as required. It ran on 80386 computers on a local area network and featured a distributed database that allowed trip editing from multiple terminals. It had an interactive graphical user interface that utilized special high-resolution display cards. The output consisted of a hard copy of schedules printed on a large-format plotter. This system saved FedEx $40,000 an hour by avoiding idle aircraft due to missing flight crews.

An application coded in LMI UR/Forth replaced a scheduling system that was implemented manually on rolls of butcher paper. The graphics code was built on videogame code written in assembler. This mission-critical system served FedEx for eight continuous years and saved them millions of dollars.

14:40

Break

15:00

Porting Graphic Haiku to F# - C.H. Ting
Brad Nelson's "Graphic Haiku" was a big hit at the April meeting and the Maker Faire. Ting described his efforts at using the Intel CPU's Floating Point Processor with F# to draw Graphic Haikus.

Graphic Haiku on F# - 154 Kb pdf file

F# code - 11 Kb txt file

Brad Nelson's Forth Haiku

15:00

Android Open Accessory Development Kit - Brad Nelson
Brad gave us a short demo of the capabilities of this kit.

Android Open Accessory Development Kit

Support

16:00

Adjourn

Other items:

Forth

Computers

Ultra-low-cost computer - used to teach computer programming to children

Maximite - runs BASIC

Software

GPU-Z - graphics chip information utility

PCwizard - full system information utility

Hardware

Electroluminescent wire

Forth Programming Books

Articles

Stores

Games

Companies

GMW Associates

Forth Jobs - submitted by Dennis Ruffer

Product Engineer - Essex, UK

Data Acquisition & Control System Engineer - Johnson Matthey - Taylor, MI

Embedded Software Engineer (Communications) - Schweitzer Engineering - Burnaby, BC

Course Lectures

People

GreenArrays

Other

Tupper's self-referential formula

30 Ridiculously Dumb Tech Warning Labels