September 2009 Meeting Notes
Compiled by Dave Jaffe
Contributions from Kevin Appert and others
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09:00 |
Halted / HSC Parking Lot
Sale
SVFIG members are encouraged to attend Halted's annual parking lot
sale in Santa Clara. There are always interesting things to see and
purchase. |
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11:30 |
Lunch
We'll convene for lunch up the street at
St. John's Bar and Grill on Lawrence
Expressway. |
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12:45 |
Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, Random Access
- SheevaPlug Computer
- Dev
Kit - $99
- Plug
Computer getting Wi-Fi
- RepRap 3D
printer
- Nanosolar
- TechRepublic - A
Resource for IT Professionals
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13:00 |
eForth in C - CH Ting
"I finally figured out
how to force C to speak Forth. What I did was first design a Forth virtual
machine in C, which has 64 Forth primitives as its machine instructions. While
it was very easy to code this virtual machine, it was difficult to implement a
Forth dictionary structure that contained both the primitive instructions as
well as high level instructions. To get C to construct this dictionary, I used
my old eP32 metacompiler to build the dictionary and shoved it down in the
throat of the gcc compiler. I think this is by far the simplest implementation
of Forth in C ever." |
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14:30 |
Beagle Board -
John Slater
John will present a walk-through of the Beagle Board
features. "I will bring my Beagle Board on Saturday and show pieces of two
videos. I will also spend a few minutes talking about my desires for a Forth
Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I am just beginning to understand
people's discussion of Object Oriented (OO) Forth."
- Gumstick
Overo
Earth
- Homebrew Robotics Club -
Beagle Board
Project Wiki
- Digi-Key
Beagle Board -
$149
- Power
Transformer also available
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15:00 |
Ray-tracing in Forth - Brad Nelson
Brad will
demonstrate a ray-tracing renderer written in Forth. Ray-tracing is a computer
graphics technique for producing realistic looking 3D images containing
shadows, reflection, and refraction. Traditionally, ray-tracers parse a scene
description file, build up complex data structures in memory, then traverse the
scene graph while performing floating point matrix calculations. In Forth these
are replaced with: scene description words, an executable scene graph, and
fixed point vector operations.
- Slides
- Snapshot
of current source code
- Animation video
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16:00 |
Adjourn |
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Other items:
- Forth
- Software
- Hardware
- Books
- Other
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