Hope you don't mind me forwarding to SVFIG. Congrats!
DaR From: Atommann Sent: Monday, October 19, 2015 8:16 PM To: Everything around amforth Subject: [Amforth] We build a robot using Amforth Hi, About two weeks ago I met a pretty lady in our office, she told me there is a Hackathon hold by their company and Shenzhen Graduate School of HIT [link 2]. At the first moment I have no idea to build what. Me: "What's the topic?" The pretty lady: "Robots" Me: "Good topic! I'll send an email to our mailing list to ask if someone else want to join." When I wrote that email I suddenly understood that I can build a robot using amforth with a bluetooth module, it can accept simple commands from computer side and draw graphics on a white board on the floor. So the idea is clear. I decide to go. But I just started to learn forth and I can just write some simple code in amforth. Fortunately we just have a coder in our hackspace and he just graduated from applied math department and implemented forth dialect with x86 assembler. But he has no MCU knowledge. But it's OK. I can finished the low level code (such as the code for servo motor which used to implement words of pen-up and pen-down) and he can finish the high level functions. A funny story during the hackathon: In a deep night we sat on a terrace and were drinking coffee and discussing which kind of graphics the robot should draw for the final demonstration. xyh (the forth coder): "I want to draw there Chinese characters" (The Chinese name of the university) Atommann: "You are crazy! Why not just draw HIT, all straight lines, easier." I was tired and went to sleep and didn't put xyh's idea (draw Chinese) in mind. The next morning when I woke up I went to see xyh's job. I saw there is a square on the white board paper on the floor. "Wow, surprise!" I said. Suddenly I found that he was coding in Chinese in Forth. All the words are defined in Chinese [link 6]. OMG. And I never expected this before :) Before the final demonstration, we found that the robot can not draw the first Chinese character nicely. xyh change the code time by time. Me: "xyh, I think it's good enough" xyh: "No, I can make it better, the value of this character is 10k RMB!" And the good thing of Amforth is that we can upload the new words to the robot by Bluetooth! We don't need to plug cable, unplug cable and no need of edit, compile, download cycle which wastes time which is valuable for a hackathon. The original idea of this project is used to teach kids programming, English, and how to control robots. At the computer side, I want to build a mini computer based on Raspberry Pi, or the 9 dollar C.H.I.P. computer [link 5], battery powered. So kids can have their own computer and a robot they can play with. The computer side, kids can also use Lisp language [link 4] to control the robot. Anyway, we finished the robot and got the No. 1 prize (10K RMB) [link 3]. Amforth is awesome! Thanks. We'll continue. links [1] We used the following motor driver. Very handy! https://github.com/wmercer/amforth/blob/609c6594076422e6592f50811ef73f054b02a256/community/Arduino-Shields/ada-shield.frt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_Graduate_School_of_Harbin_Institute_of_Technology [3] some photos http://www.leiphone.com/news/201510/Hk7mizNbynrIInam.html Team members: I am the one in orange, xyh is in black with long hair, bnw is in the 1st photo in this article. [4] Scheme code for lambda-tortoises (the name of this robot) https://github.com/szdiy/lambda-tortoise [5] CHIP - The World's First Nine Dollar Computer https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer/description [6] The code which draws Chinese for the final demonstration https://github.com/xieyuheng/ada-shield/blob/master/show.org -- Best regards, Atommann ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel
