Re: [Amforth-devel] Connection to host

[Erich W. <ew....@na...>]

Hi folks,

Tom Arnold wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 09:22:22PM +0000, Andy Kirby wrote:
>> What would be really cool would be if you could take an off the shelf 
>> Arduino Mega, burn amforth onto it and then use this Forthduino to clone 
>> itself to other off the shelf Arduino Mega's
>>
>> I guess a new design of Atmel based micro board that was purely amforth 
>> would be cool too.
> 
> Making amforth work with the Arduino bootloader I think would open up
> amforth to a lot more people who may not otherwise want to undertake trying
> to play with it.  Forth has a somewhat bad ( un-deserved ) reputation as being 
> difficult to deal with as it is.  Having it incompatible with widely
> available cheap hardware just adds to that.  The Arduino bootloader is
> nothing magical.  Its just a simple software implementation of the STK500
> protocol.  
> 
> Going with Arduino vs a dedicated amforth board opens up amforth to the
> world of arduino "shields" ( I hate that name ) which widens up the hardware
> available to quickly throw at a project.
> 
> I know there are reasons why its not supported, like Arduino didn't exist
> with amforth first came about, I'm only saying it'd be nice.  I wish I had
> the skillset to make it happen.  It is worth pointing out that a USB based
> Atmel programmer is dirt cheap these days ( $20 or so from AdaFruit I think
> ).  That makes it fairly easy to turn an Arduino Mega into an AmforthMega.
> Easy but not trivial.  Supporting the loader would make it trivial...
> 

I agree very much with this comment. I'm trying to set up a class to teach
microcontroller programming using amforth on an atmega32 or similar. We had
long and somewhat heated discussions about the hardware to use. We are
still very much undecided.

Making amforth work with the arduino boot loader requires some work on the
arduino bootloader, as far as I have understood this. It's not impossible. It
just needs to be done. The key point is that the workings of i! and i@ must
reside in the protected flash (boot loader area). Or something along
these lines.

Cheers,
Erich