Re: [Amforth-devel] Marker etc.

[Marcin C. <sa...@sa...>]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2010, Al Williams wrote:

> One of my many hats is that I am a "blogger" for the venerable Dr. Dobb's
> Journal (I used to do columns for their magazines, but blogging is hipper ;)
> ).
>
> I wrote about my experiences with Amforth:
> http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/archives/2010/09/forth_love_if_h.html
>
> I am very impressed with it, although my original purpose might not be
> suitable. I was thinking of having inexpensive development boards for
> students. The problem is once you mess up the flash you have to reprogram. I
> was thinking long term it would be possible to either have a bootloader built
> in that would let you reflash a pristine system. Sort of a rescue mode.
>
> Maybe something I'll try when I ever get enough free time.

Amforth has a kind of bootloader built-in, since it constantly
flashes new words defined.

I am doing so-called in-line serial programming with two Arduinos
(cheap AVR development board with USB - http://www.arduino.cc/)
connected to each other. One runs the flasher (not yet in Forth, but
soon!) and the other one is being flashed. I don't even have a programmer
here.

Actually we have a project with 4 AVRs connected to another one (a
master) via the SPI interface, and we will probably try to test
re-programming them on the fly via SPI (exciting possibility of a
really self-replicating, self-deploying distributed programming).

There is also possibility to flash the Arduino board completely
in-line via the FTDI chip that is on-board there, but one needs to
solder a small 4-pin header to the board and it's kind of slow, but
works great in emergency.

//Marcin