[Amforth] List of Supported Device Features in Amforth Documentation?

[<fr...@fr...>]

Hi!


Summary: I believe you could greatly increase the
number of Amforth users with little effort providing
one Wiki page per hardware device. There you would
provide fuse settings, name of a suitable binary,
parameters for the flasher etc. in order to reduce the
frustration of a rookie to see the first Forth prompt.
It's only 20-50 devices, that's not much compared to
the list of devices in Arch Linux for example (I found
my specific laptop model there...).
SourceForge offers a Wiki very suitable for that!


In Detail:

I'm a fellow open source guy, running a project
here on SourceForge for a living:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/project-open/
Also, 30 years ago I wrote a Forth for Inmos
Transputers...


So: Congratulations to your work on Amforth!
I managed to get it running on a barebone AtMega
328 for a hobby project (a tracked robot with my
son...).

I implemented drivers for both stepper motors
and DC motors with angle coders without too much
trouble and to send Forth commands over SPI.

However, I got some trouble trying to connect
multiple 328s to a single RasPi and finally serious
trouble with spikes from the DC motors affecting
the SPI bus :-(

For the next iteration I'd like to decouple the
various I/O subsystems electrically and use UART
over USB for communication in order to address the
issues both with multiple devices (USB hub as PI
HAT) and noise (USB has differential signaling...)

So, I'd like to use a 32U4 or Mega 2560 or similar
for each subsystem and a RasPi Zero W as a base,
but I haven't yet purchased anything.
Here some information on the supported features
would come in handy. I've spent several hours
trying to understand if/how Amforth supports
USB/UART in these model. 6.9 doesn't seem to
support it at all, correct?


There isn't much space in a robot, and USB cables
are surprisingly bulky. And now imagine that I'd
somehow need to have 2x USB for each Atmega...

I wonder if I'm the only one trying to build a more
complex system using Amforth or if others had
similar problems...

I have also found very few postings in the Internet
from people connecting multiple Arduinos to
a RasPI or to build bigger projects in general.
That's precisely where I see the value of Amforth,
because it introduces a protocol layer that is
easy to debug and decouples the subsystems.


Cheers, and keep up the good work!
Frank