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The Forth Stamp(s)

From: Robert Bernecky   berneckyrogers.com
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:02:50 -0800

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I'm sure most of you are already aware of this, but just in case...

I've been trying to clean up my unread-periodicals mountain 
(It's threatening to collapse, and I'm too young to die.),
and came across Dr. Frenger's article on Stampism ("Embed With Forth", 
SIGPLAN Notices, August 2004). He talks about the history of the
BASIC Stamp, which we've all used for various projects; I used one
for my SpaceProbe piece.

Then, he introduces "The Forth Stamp(s)".  As you might expect,
these are FORTH versions of microcontrollers. Aside from the usual
bigger/faster/cheaper stuff, these stamps are of interest to me for
two reasons:

 - The amrStamp300 has (Gasp!) interactive debugging support, including
    inspection of variables, single-stepping, I/O pin value inspection,
etc.

 - More interesting, I think, is multi-theading!

New Micros has a "TiniPod" (based on a Motorola DSP56F80x) FORTH Stamp. 
>From Frenger's article:

"The TiniPod can be programmed in C, Forth, or IsoMax. IsoMax is a Forth
extension intended to facilitate creation of state machines in a
multitasking
environment... The overall effect is that a single Forth stamp behaves
as
a cluster of independent Basic Stamps, loosely coupled, and running
simultaneously."

Most robotic projects can really benefit from this sort of stuff - it's
a lot
easier than hand-rolling your own shared-variable processor and task
dispatcher
on every project - and much more reliable than trusting a programmer to
get it right.

I'm sure there are newer, fancier versions of this stuff, but I think
this
is just spiffy. Of course, I haven't tried to actually USE one of the
suckers...

Bob


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