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 _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
