Re: [Amforth-devel] Connection to host

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

Hi Andy,
thanks for your detailed reply.

To expand more on the "teaching class" thing ...

I would like to see a small board with
1. a usb connection, which
    a. brings in power
    b. connects to the serial tx/rx port
AND most importantly
    c. also provides a way to reload the board from scratch,
       be it In-System-Programming or JTAG or something else.

It is my firm believe that a participant of the class must be
able to load a virgin controller before the class is finished.

2. a prototype area

It also is my firm believe that a board must be extensible
somehow. Arduino shields are one way to do this.

3. the controller itself should be "removable" or exchangeable.

It has hit me more than once, that I suspected portpins to be broken.
So I insert another controller an see if the problem changes. There
is no other way to rule out a ``faulty'' controller. So I would
content with a little DIL-40 sized board with a MLF sized atmega-32
on top, for example.

4. some predefined periphery for the class
    a. a RGB led connected to the PWM Pins.
    b. some (4?) normal leds, some switches
    c. a buzzer or
    d. a small H-bridge for a stepper motor
    e. pullups for i2c, a sensor (temperature) or clock
       or a 1-wire controller
    f. a connector for a 10x2 LCDisplay
    g. a poti for one of the ADC pins

I want to have this, because I believe that only sufficiently
complex examples are going to hook newbies. ``let's blink an LED''
is a necessary step, but must not be the last one. ``let's make
the color of the led change any way we want, e.g. driven by the
temperature sensor ...'' sounds much better to me. But I may be
wrong.

Then, if the board is readily availabe, people can use this for their
next project without thinking.

Bootloader: I personally don't need it. If it helps a newbie to
start fiddling with controllers, fine. I need to teach how to get
a virgin controller off the ground anyway.
How do Arduino folks get a virgin controller flashed with the boot
loader?

It seems, we largely agree on this stuff.

Matthias is making another point: If we do not provide quite a number
of forth modules to access sensors and stuff, we won't get far. Look
at perl. Try to imagine perl without CPAN. So I ``donated'' the ewlib
directory with hopefully useful stuff.

We'll see. I want to get my current pet project out of the way before
trying to shape up a class. No need to hurry.


Btw: I went to FOSDEM (Brussels) beginning of February. The reprap folks
were there, too. But I missed to ask you, whether you went there as well.

Cheers,
Erich