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

[George H. <jac...@gm...>]

Frankly, making everything USB dependent takes you into trouble.
USB is to some extent proprietary, where as RS-232, SPI, and I2C are easier
to deploy.

Early versions of the Raspberry Pi had deeply constrained power
distribution. That may be a source of further woes.

Perhaps a shift to an STM324xx device with multiple available USARTs and
Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth would be more appropriate than a Raspberry Pi with
Linux.

Individual wikis for each device would certainly be nice in AmForth, but I
suspect this is suffering sufficient manpower to maintain. There are ARM
fuse selection applications available that can be somewhat useful.


On Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 6:54 AM <fr...@fr...> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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