ForthSeen - Alternative Embedded Systems

GA144 - Wild Iris Discovery

I found no news, but a blog with some interesting thoughts about the GA144:
wildirisdiscovery.blogspot.de

For me the GA144 has still its fascination. Currently I'm thinking a lot about Virtual Maschines, Byte Code and minimalistic CPUs like the J1-Forth-CPU. If you think about minimal systems you automatically come back to the GA144 ..
Anyway if you have interesting news or projects around the GA144 please send me an email : admin(at)dmemos.de

2015-Aug-16 17:30 – GA, WwwFinds, Thoughts

No more GA144 - for me

There is not too much news about the GA144 - one active guy is James Bowman with his alternative Python tool set:
https://github.com/jamesbowman

Out of a gut feeling I will not continue my GA144 activities. I have spent another long weekend to understand the core and to decide whether to continue my own tool set or to stop.
On one side the core is quite simple, but it's elegance is sacrificed through the hardware minimalism with leads to packing and unpacking of up to 4 commands in one word and some other partly undocumented system functions - which makes everything complicated.
On the other side I've never got the slightest feedback and I do not see new activities from other sides.

This blog will continue with new activities - I am still on the search for alternative embedded systems.
My goal is to find or to create a true simple system, where you don't have to read through thick manuals, where you can start programming in an hour, producing immediately productive and working code.
From the hardware side I next want to look to ARM-M based systems, currently you can get such 32bit chips for a fraction of a Dollar

2015-May-15 10:00 – GA, WwwFinds, Thoughts

Getting started with the GA144

I found another interesting link for the GA144, an exact instruction how to write and run your own program as a simulation in the Arrayforth IDE. The best description I found until now !

Getting Started With The GA144 And ArrayForth

If you look over it and if you have in mind that you have also to use a special keyboard, you'll get a good impression how uncomfortable the IDE is.

The begin of the year was busy, not too much time for my GA project. But I think I should start the next steps for my simulator.

2015-Jan-21 19:00 – GA, WwwFinds, Thoughts

GA144 Usage and Applications

Occasionally I'm talking about my new hobby, the GreenArrays and Chuck Moore's GA144 super chip, just yesterday with some colleagues and an university Professor at dinner. It's always the same - A count of 144 32-bit processors each having only 64 words of RAM and 64 words of ROM.. For what the heck do you need this? - what can you do with it ? is the normal reaction - That's exactly what I want to find out my answer.

Here are my thoughts about this GA144-project, as a beginner with this IC, but also as an electronics engineer with 28+ years of working experience in development:

A controller system stripped to the minimum
.. by the way maybe you could leave out one or the other command :)
I like the asynchronous design
I like the minimal power consumption
I like that there is no interrupt
I like the simplicity - you can have the whole system in your head
I like the higher reliability and robustness within a smaller system
I like the whole FORTH idea
.. it would be great to reduce current software to 1% of the size .. and more
It's like LEGO you have some simple parts .. discover the possibilities
.. you can build your own peripherals by demand
.. you can build parallel peripherals
.. you can build self-modifying and optimizing systems
The future prospects and the potential are great, too ..
.. you can make it smaller down to a few processors, super small like dust
.. you could put thousands of processor in parallel if necessary

A few weeks back in my holidays I read again two of my favourite books, one after the other, Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters and Carmine Gallo's The innovation secrets of Steve Jobs . At the same time I mused about the GA144. The whole chip is simple ingenious. What lacks is the continuation of the idea outside of the chip. A super simple and beautiful programming environment. What Paul Graham named as one or two more abstraction layers, above the FORTH-machine language, maybe something like LISP or the 100-year-Language. The IDE should be simple like LEGO, intuitive in operation, so that a 10 year old child could use it ..
I have a day job, a family and an old house, the reason why it will take some time, but this are roughly my plans:

Understanding and testing the GA144
Writing a first abstraction layer - maybe in newLISP
.. a simulator - dto.
.. a profiler - dto.
.. a function library
Writing a second abstraction layer ..
.. maybe a graphical interface
.. in Java or Clojure
.. as an APP for Anroid
At best a bit of everything in parallel .. ;)

2014-Sep-10 18:00 – GA, Thoughts, NewLISP

WwwFinds ..

Secrects of Frugality - GreenArrays Presentation on forth.org

Efficient Implementation of Cryptographic Primitives on the GA144 Multi-core Architecture

ga144tools - Python toolchain for GA144 - James Bowman on github

GA144 Running C - James Bowman on forth.org

The Python-Toolchain for the GA144 seems to be quite interesting, maybe it's a bit of sacrilege for a Forth purist ( not me ).
In contrast to the elegant simplicity of the GA144 chip, the current ArrayForth development environment is in my view the complete opposite, difficult for beginners to use and to understand - if at all.

If I would be unfaithful to my beloved newLISP, I would choose more mainstream, a Java based solution, maybe Clojure, an Android APP would be cool and a great advertisement - of course also for training as a simulator and perhaps even as a programming tool via USB-interface .. I should think about this...

2014-Sep-01 19:00 – GA, WwwFinds, Thoughts, NewLISP

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