Forth Day 2008 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

09:00

Coffee and a Chat

09:10

Welcome Message - SVFIG President George Perry

09:15

Amateur Radio Direction Finding Using a PIC Forth Processor - Bill Ragsdale
Bill, K6KN, will present his project, a radio direction finder for amateur radio "bunny hunts". To develop the one-chip PIC design, he has written a PIC Forth nucleus, interactive emulator, assembler, loader, and application code using Win32 Forth.

Video

09:45

Rainbow Forth becomes a WebApp - Brad Nelson
Brad will demonstrate a reimplementation of ColorForth as a web application written in Javascript using Google AppEngine as a datastore.

Rainbow Forth on Google - requires a Google account

Video

10:15

Firmware Engineering Workshop - CH Ting
"eForth is a very simple Forth implementation portable to all types of microprocessors and microcontrollers. eForth's ideal platform requires 16 KBytes of RAM/ROM memory. If both ROM and RAM memory can be mapped to the same logical memory space, the firmware development will be greatly simplified. I will demonstrate two platforms, an ARM7-based prototype board from Olimex and an eP32 system implemented on a FPGA from Altera. Substantial Forth application code has been written and verified on these systems. This Workshop summarizes how to produce firmware with eForth."

Video

10:45

Break

11:00

Forth 200x Standards Process - Leon Wagner
"A new standards process (known as Forth 200x) for updating the 1994 ANS Forth standard is underway. I attended the most recent Forth 200x meeting in Vienna in September and will give a brief report on the current status of the updated standard."

Forth 200x

11:15

SwiftForth for Linux - Leon Wagner
"FORTH, Inc. ported the core of SwiftForth-Win32 to Linux last winter and have been using it internally as well as on a few selected customer projects. The system has been in alpha test for about 10 months and is nearly ready to release."

Video

11:30

ForthDrive Project Sees First Light - Samuel A. Falvo II
"I've managed to get a ForthDrive to render to a VGA display. If time and space permits, I'll discuss the code and give a small demo."

Links:

SEAforth VGA Display Project: Part 2

Article

Source files - zipped tar.gz

FalvoTech

Forth Day 2008 Report

Video

Noon

BBQ Lunch - Catered by CH Ting

13:00

Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, Random Access

13:05

IntellaSys Update

SEAforth® Evaluation Kit 40C18 (SEK 40C18) - Dylan Smeder

Serial Terminal Driver Demo - Charley Shattuck - video

eForth and Interactive Debugger (IDB) Demo - John Rible - video

Communicating Processes and Talking Voltmeter Demo - Jeff Fox - video

New Music Demo - Michael Montvelishky - video

Video

15:40

Break

16:00

Fireside Chat - c18 Instruction Set - Forty Years of Forth - Chuck Moore

Chuck's bio

Notes: colorForth Instructions

Video

17:00

Adjourn

17:30

Banquet

Hangen Szechuan Restaurant

134 Castro St.

Mountain View, CA

650/964-8881

Menu

Other items:

Forth

Jason Damisch's Forth Day review with photos

Sam Falvo's Forth Day 2008 Report

Jupiter Ace Resource Site - Forth software

Component-based Forth - Joseph M. O'Connor - 232 Kb pdf file

Other