August 2008 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

10:30

Coffee and a Chat

10:40

Forth Day 2008
Suggest a speaker or volunteer to speak!

11:00

Firmware Engineering Workshop for ARM7 - CH Ting
"I just finished the flash programming portion of the Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) project. On booting, eForth copies itself from Flash memory to RAM and runs from RAM. The application, written in Forth, is compiled into a dictionary space in RAM. The extended image of the entire eForth system can now be written back to Flash memory. After reset, the new image is copied from Flash and runs correctly in RAM. This effort completes the firmware development cycle."

Slides - pdf file

2 Hz frame rate for display of waveforma and DFT

368 Khz sampling rate

Noon

Lunch
Some folks bring their lunch, some will eat on-campus or nearby.

13:30

Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, Random Access

14:00

Program Development Environment for Handheld Devices and PCs - Masa Kasahara
Masa has spent a great deal of time searching for the ideal platform to run his music education programs. He has looked at many handheld devices that would provide the portability required to practice anywhere. Important requirements include light weight, commercial availability, ease of use, ease of developing programs, and a seamless development environment. Recently, Masa began investigating the Allegro multi-platform game library for single source development for most operating systems running on today's PCs.

Slides - 91 KB pdf file

14:30

Forth to .NET Compiler Video
As a compact, stack-based programming language, Forth was popular in the 1980s as a lower-level alternative to BASIC for microcomputers and is still used in many commercial environments. When Valer Bocan discovered .NET in 2001, he decided to try writing his first compiler, and Forth.NET was the result.

Dr. Sneath interviews him to find out a little more about how a single Romanian developer became one of the first people to extend .NET to new programming languages.

Forth to .NET Compiler

Valer Bocan's Web Log

World’s First Forth Compiler for the .NET Platform

Download Delta Forth .NET

15:00

Random Access - All in attendance
Will it be random or just pseudo-random? We always find something to talk about.

16:00

Adjourn

Other items:

Forth

Other