Since reading the Hack-A-Day article on AmForth I knew I had to try running Forth on an Arduino. Thanks to the good folks on this mailing list I quickly got AmForth up and running on an Arduino Uno board and started to look around for a project to use this technology on. I hadn't used Forth in years but have a fondness for it that is hard to explain. I had previously used Forth at JPL for testing of the Galileo spacecraft data system, at Rolm for testing PBX's and PBX components and a little at Sun Microsystems which used Forth as a bootloader for most of their Solaris based computers.
I decided to use AmForth to build a device driver and graphics library for a Sainsmart 3.2" LCD display that I previously used on another project (see the Contemplator article in Nuts and Volts magazine Dec 2012). In the hope this code might be useful to the Forth community I have made the code freely available here: http://www.craigandheather.net/misc/Lindley_AmForth_LCD_Driver.zip You are welcome to use this code anyway you want. If you use it for a cool project I would like to hear about it. My email address is: cal...@gmail.com . This code runs only an an Arduino Uno but could be easily modified to run on other Arduino's. To use the this LCD display with an Arduino Uno requires soldering 24 wires between the boards. Also, because the 16 bit interface used between the boards requires every I/O pin the Arduino Uno has, the touch screen controller and the memory card interface on the LCD display are unavailable. The code consists of the following files four Forth files: ssd1289.frt This is a device driver for the display which uses the ssd1289 LCD controller chip ssd1289Graphics.frt This is the graphics library with functions for drawing: pixels, horizontal lines, vertical lines, regular lines, rectangles, filled rectangles, circles and filled circles utils.frt This file contains various functions for case statements, random numbers, sin function and various color space conversion and color palette functions. demo.frt This file contains various demos of the graphics functions. Run the "demo" word to see all of the graphic examples You must have postpone.frt and marker.frt loaded before attempting to load the above files. Also, the files must be loaded in the order shown. This code works well except for flickering when doing a lot of display updates. I will be looking into this issue and will update the zip file with any changes I make. NOTE: my Forth skills are a bit rusty so some of the code is sub optimal. If any of you rewrite the code, please send me the changes. Enjoy, Craig Lindley -- Craig Lindley If you’re one in a million, there are now seven thousand people exactly like you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ DreamFactory - Open Source REST & JSON Services for HTML5 & Native Apps OAuth, Users, Roles, SQL, NoSQL, BLOB Storage and External API Access Free app hosting. Or install the open source package on any LAMP server. Sign up and see examples for AngularJS, jQuery, Sencha Touch and Native! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63469471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
