Sunday, March 17, 2019

Alien Technology... of sorts...and a restart?

It's been a long time since I've blogged here.  I have no idea if anybody is still reading this, but I'll go ahead and say that I intend to start writing more blog entries in the coming weeks.

But, in the meantime, a bit of catch-up:

I've had a wonderful opportunity during 2017-2018 to work with GreenArrays and their wonderful GA144 chip, on an actual real work project.  There were lots of starts and stops, and not quite "full time", but we did deliver around 25 boards (and software) to the customer for "evaluation and proof-of-principle" goals.  They liked what they got (delivered last December), but... they don't know if they want to continue. 

I also got to do some more work with MyForth (Charley Shattuck's Arduino version) and have (for my own personal projects) pivoted back to the 8051 version (Charley & Bob Nash's work).
I ported MyForth to SiLab's (new) SleepyBee (EFM8SB2).  I'll write more about that later. Perhaps a lot more, since it is one of my Copious Free Time projects.

Taking a break from intense GA144 work (in PolyFORTH and arrayFORTH)  I am getting nostalgic for Forth block editors.  I'm an emacs die-hard, but there is something still very focused and useful in using a block editor (well, especially when it is integrated into your development environment as deeply as PolyFORTH is on the GA144).

I may dust off my GA144 EVB and do some toolsmithing or I may dive deeper into the MyForth tooling (hmmm... can I fit a block oriented dev environment on an EFM82B2?)  Recompilation is the challenge (as all of that is done in the PC under gforth).  I could use the gforth block editor but MyForth is not an incremental compiler....

Still... I expect to do more Forth in the next few months (if not at work, then on my Copious Free Time projects).  Stay tuned.